It's hard to gauge success, especially in the early stages of a blog. You're making maybe 1-2 cents a day with AdSense, no one is buying that great t-shirt you designed, and the only comments you're getting are from people in Slovstakiskania, offering to sell you Cialis. Sometimes it can get downright frustrating. 

How can you tell you're building an audience, when there is no immediate, visceral evidence of you having one?

I use Google's tools to track my webcomic's performance. I'd like to show you what I do, and how to set it up, so you can use it to measure your own blog's success as well.

AdSense

The first tool I turn to is Google AdSense. It's a tool with two purposes: it helps monetize your site (that's web 2.0 mumbo jumbo for "make money") and it helps you track visitors. It's not as robust as Analytics, which we'll look at next, but for a quick overview, it does the job admirably. It also has an important difference between its raw reports and Analytics'.

If you don't already have an AdSense account, I recommend you get one. It's free, it pays you to use it, and the only real restriction is that your site isn't "adult" in nature (some of my erotic writer friends may be borderline not-approved bloggers). I'm not going to spend any time here explaining how to get an account and get AdSense set up. If you need information on that, do a quick Google search for setting it up on whatever blogging platform you're using. I recommend you check out these sites, too: Blogger Hints and Tips and My Blogger Tricks.

When you're ready to start measuring your results, log in to AdSense. The initial page looks like this.

Click on the "View Full Reports" link to the far right of the date. This will give us some important graphing tools. 

Once you've got the graph up, you can set the date for the date range you want to analyze. Click on the Date Range at the top right, and select the time period you want to look at. I usually do this on a monthly basis, and click "Last Month" or set custom values manually.

Then, especially if you're not receiving much revenue to speak of for your site, change the view from estimated earnings to page views. You'll now have a day-by-day graph of the traffic to your site that requested an AdSense ad. I highlight that because this graph will not show you people who've got Adblocker installed, nor will it tell you when someone simply linked to a graphic on your site or flat-out copied your text. So keep that in mind when you see the rendered grid.

I had a particularly great end-of-the month comic!

To do a comparison you simply have to pick a previous month in the date range tool, and see what it tells you.

In my case, most of March hovered between 100 and 200 hits a day, never peaking much higher than that, except for an extraordinary day near the end of the month. (That was a stumbleupon day. For some reason, my "Most Interesting Hobbit in the World" comic got the Hobbit front page that day. Plus, I took mid-April off to go on vacation, as evidenced by the flat line through the middle of the month. All in all, even though the served page views here are slightly lower from March to April, I felt April was a good month, improving slightly over March.

Analytics

So, are there better, more indepth ways of analyzing this data? Yes. There is. Jump over to http://analytics.google.com. Again, this article isn't going to delve into how to set these up. If there's interest, I'll write up articles on how to do it. Right now I just want to show you how I use the tool. Much the same way... set the month up in the date range finder at the top right. And in the "metric" selector (the little box just under the word "Overview") select "Unique Visitors." I prefer unique visitor counts because that helps eliminate the massive number of times I hit refresh myself waiting for comments from people. :D

Underneath the graph, Analytics will give you both counts anyway. Total visitors, and total unique visitors. 

So, I had 2600 people visit the site in March. Not bad. Changing the date-range finder to April, I get the following.

The count went up. Over 3100 visits by nearly 2900 unique visitors -- an increase of nearly 300 people. That's pretty nice! We can use this tool to see trending lines, too. For my case, I stretched the date-range finder to a 3-month period, February through April. You can see February was way down -- it was the first month, and I started late in the month. March comes with a solid number, and then if you look carefully at the graph, you can see that the line is trending upward.

In the metric selector now, add a second metric: % New Visits. This will show you how many returning visitors you had. A great sign of reader retention is when people come back to your site. With a new site, I don't expect a whole lot of repeat business yet. But I'd like to see people become fans, subscribe, and keep coming back every week.

And there, I can see that the percent of new visitors was close to 100% in March, but had declined slightly in April. In other words, people are starting to stick around! Over time, I expect to see this trend to continue, even as the total visitor count increases.

So there you have it. Probably not the best way to do it, probably there are far more accurate tools, but if you're just starting out and want to see a quick snapshot of how your words or images are getting out there, this does the job. If you've got any questions or suggestions for me about this, please leave a comment, or email me at clary.david@gmail.com.

You've seen this scene played out in a dozen zombie movies, or other similarly themed horror films. Of the survivors of a great horrific apocalypse, a couple remains, and one of them becomes infected with whatever evil-causing disease that transforms humans into monsters. The other member of the couple ends up with just a few paths to take in the film. He either acknowledges she's dead to the world, and kills off her body, or he refuses to do it out of the memory of their love, and ends up dying himself.

We love Braaaaains. We also love Rocky Road, eating heads, and taking long walks on the beach

What's more important to you: love or logic? More specifically, if you had to choose between the needs of your heart or the needs of your head -- in a crisis situation -- which would win out? I think it's an important question to study, because the answers might surprise a lot of people. I also think it's important because like a lot of people, I grow more and more concerned about our world governments' ability to contain and control the next exceptionally virulent mega-plague when it erupts.

The question I mean to ask is this:

If your life partner (wife, husband, fiancee, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever) was turned into a zombie during the Zompocalypse, would you let her eat your brains so you could be with her in death, or would you shoot her in the head, to save yourself, and possibly the human race?

Corollary question: If you were turned into a zombie, and your life partner had to choose between letting you feed, or putting you down, what would you want him or her to do?

In other words, when the shit *truly* hits the fan, do you as a human being side with your emotional half - love - or your intellectual half - logic?

We have seen, and generally accept that the human species is capable, and in fact very often rises to the challenge of self-sacrifice, when the choice is yourself or your friends. Our greatest heroes have all been willing to lay down and die so others would live. This is a more personal, more challenging question, though. This is not a choice between you or your comrades dying. This is a choice of who will you kill? Yourself, or the love of your life?

I plan on studying this question intensely in the future. I think there's a case to be made that understanding how and why we respond in the way we do can help us better map and comprehend the human condition better than any question asked before.

Even though I've been thinking about this topic for some time, the impetus for today's post is the Absolute Write May Blog Chain. If you enjoy blogging, enjoy the company of smart, creative writers, and want to share in the fun of a monthly writing prompt, you should check it out. This month's prompt ("The Zompocalypse") is detailed here: http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=243695.

I also encourage you to check out everyone else's entry for the prompt. Those links are below.

dclary - www.hardhobbittobreak.com (link to this month's image)
orion_mk3 - http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month's post)
randi.lee - http://emotionalnovel.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
Ralph Pines - http://ralfast/wordpress.com/ (link to this month's post)
writingismypassion - http://charityfaye.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
dclary - http://www.davidwclary.com/ (link to this month's post)
SinisterCola - http://acgatesblog.wordpress.com/ (link to this month's post)
PragmaticPimp - http://www.unfoldingmyth.com/ (link to this month's post)
magicmint - http://www.loneswing.com/ (link to this month's post)
Diana_Rajchel - http://blog.dianarajchel.com/ (link to this month's post)
SuzanneSeese - http://www.viewofsue.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
AFord - http://writeword.blog.com/ (link to this month's post)
J.W.Alden - http://www.authoralden.com/ (link to this month's post)
Nissie - http://www.paperheroes.net/ (link to this month's post)
MonkeyQueen - http://www.mylifewithmonkeys.com/ (link to this month's post)
areteus - http://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ (link to this month's post)
pyrosama - http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
pangalactic - http://sonofflash365.blogspot.co.uk/ (link to this month's post)
Sweetwheat - http://gomezkarla.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
Penelope - http://poet-slash-writer.blogspot.com/ (link to this month's post)
kimberlycreates - http://kimberlycreates.com/ (link to this month's post)

Over at Hard Hobbit to Break, I've been working on slowly increasing my readership and pageviews, shooting for each month's stats to be at least a little higher than the previous month's. So far, so good. The visitor counts are still small, which is no surprise given what I'm doing, but they're climbing. 

I post comics every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and on those days, I market for about an hour a day -- in the morning I'll post to every social network I belong to, and then once or twice throughout the day I'll send out ticklers reminding people about the new post. As you can imagine, traffic is higher on those days, than on days without marketing efforts.

On off days -- Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday -- I sometimes post links from older comics to various social sites, hoping to catch folks who haven't seen the comic in an earlier post. But I try to be really careful about this. There aren't a lot of older episodes to go around quite yet, and most sites will ban you if they think you're just spamming.

In a later post I'll talk about the methods I use for tracking hits and visitors, etc. Today, though, I want to talk about a form of networking I haven't used before. At least, I hadn't until yesterday. I'm not sure I'll use it again, either, because it seems very pushy to me. 

I'm talking about directed word of mouth. The comic is brand new. It generates close to zero income, and really, until I get some t-shirts, or enough comics for a book together, that trend won't change soon. So I can't afford to advertise traditionally. I can only rely on my own efforts and -- I discovered yesterday -- the efforts of my friends.

This was the graph I was looking at yesterday. It was 4:00, and this was looking to become the first day a "new comic posted" day drew fewer readers than an off day.

On Facebook, I wrote an impassioned plea -- just for people to share my page. They didn't have to contribute money, or time, or even say anything positive about it. Just show it to their friends.  Essentially, I was trying to see if "word of mouth" alone could make a difference.

Well, it was a success. At least seven people shared it on Facebook -- possibly other shared it on their other social networks too. Before I left work an hour later, my graph had fixed itself. By the end of the day, it was as proud a line as graphs can make. The day ended with visitor counts 3 times higher than they'd been at 4:00, and yesterday ended up being the second biggest day of the last 8 days. 

Your friends want you to succeed. They wouldn't be your friends otherwise. What they don't know, though, is how they can help you, or why they should. They also don't want to be used or abused. Who would?

If you use this marketing approach, be careful with it. Don't abuse the good nature of your friends. Be gracious and grateful. I know I am. My friends amaze and astound me daily with their goodness, inspiration, creativity, and passion. Thank you eveyone. You made yesterday a great day for my little hobbit, and you showed the power of Word of Mouth.

If you haven't read Hard Hobbit to Break, btw, you should. You totally should. And please -- share it with your friends.

What I spent my morning doing. Lol.

Oh, this game's easy. Hey, wait. What are you doing? Oh my...

If you haven't read the epic fantasy series by George R.R. Martin, "A Song of Ice and Fire" -- the first "A Game of Thrones" -- you're missing out on some extraordinarily well-written politics, intrigue, medieval mayhem, and epic fantasy. If you haven't seen the HBO Series based on the books, you're missing out on some of the best television being broadcast today (although this is less of an achievement, since their competition is Snooky, "guys who do stupid jobs that you'd never want, but some tv executive thinks you'd watch every night on A&E", and "people singing and/or dancing for a shot at fame").

I won't spoil any of this for you. If you haven't seen the series, or read the books, or overheard your office workers discussing it in the break room, or seen someone post "OMG, Tyrion!" on your Facebook feed, then you should probably just head on out of this post now. I don't want to ruin any future enjoyment for you. Unless you want to make money, become wealthy, and enjoy financial freedom simply by following the mottos of the major houses in this series.

It's true. While watching the show will shake your faith in humanity -- good guys lose, bad guys lose, good guys turn bad, bad guys don't always get their comeuppance -- it also has some secret messages that we can learn from. Messages hidden right in plain sight: in the mottos of the major houses.

The first house, and the closest characters to "heros" in the series is house Stark. We'll start with them, and then move on to their enemies the Lannisters, followed by the Martells, the Tullys and then the Tyrells.

HOUSE STARK -- Winter is Coming

The Starks lived farthest north of the Great Houses. In this fantasy world, each season could be several years long, but Starks always stood prepared against the winter, because they would always suffer the worst from it when it come. Their motto, "Winter is coming" is the motto we should adopt for our financial situations today. Whether or not we're experiencing good times or hard times now, it is imperative to be prepared for even worse times to come. 

Dave Ramsey, the financial guru agrees. He makes, as one of his first "baby steps" to financial security: set aside six months of salary as an emergency slush fund. You never know what might happen: Your wife might get pregnant. Your car may break down. A tragedy may require you to fly across the country. You could lose your job. Be prepared. Winter is coming. Even if it never comes in your lifetime, you are better served by being prepared for it, than by not.

HOUSE LANNISTER -- Lannisters Always Pay Their Debts

The Lannisters were by far the wealthiest of the major houses. Part of that was because of natural resources that their lands held. But another part was because they managed their obligations wisely. Tyrion, the dwarf-sized Lannister used this motto like money itself. His credit was as good as his word: He paid, he always paid, and the people who dealt with him knew he could be trusted (as far as being paid went). This needs to be a priority for us as well. 

Fixing your credit (if it's poor) is not just a good idea, or a "bucket list" item. It's necessary, especially in today's economy, when people's access to money has grown tighter and tighter. Find ways to do it, even if it means sacrificing luxuries like cable television or cell phones. Pay off your debts, and do it as promptly as you can. Your credit rating will thank you -- more importantly, your creditors themselves will be more willing to work with you. Being debt-free is the first major step toward being completely financially free.

It doesn't hurt to be smart, conniving, deceitful, manipulative, and bawdry too,
but let's just stick to finances for today.

HOUSE MARTEL -- Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken

Becoming financially free is *hard* -- if it wasn't, everyone would be doing it. It requires major sacrifice: eat economical meals at home. Don't go to the movies. Don't pay for luxuries (and everything that doesn't keep you fed, clothed, and housed is a luxury) until you have your "Winter is Coming" fund established. This requires strength. Strength of conviction, strength of commitment, the strength to say "No," when temptation comes calling -- and be assured, it will. Our entire society is built on and our economy hinges around your participation in a mercantile marketplace. 

But it can be done. For your sake, the sake of your family, and the sake of your heirs, it needs to be done. Don't give in, don't surrender. It is hard now, but when winter comes, you'll be ready. And if winter never comes ... your summer will be all the brighter, warmer, and more enjoyable for your having saved and scrimped and accumulated.

Look at Soichiro Honda's fortunes, for example. He worked at Toyota, and came up with a new way to make piston rings. They rejected his idea. He quit, formed his own company to make the rings, and made a fortune selling them to Toyota. Until WWII... When the allies (that's us) blew his factory to bits. He sold that company and founded the company we know today as Honda. He started selling motorized bicycles, and then in 1948, full motorcycles. Within ten years he was outselling Harleys in America and Triumphs in the UK. He was truly, never beaten, bowed, or broken. He would have done well in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. 

HOUSE TULLY -- Family, Duty, Honor

These are the things you need to remember as you climb your way to the top. Remember your family. Do your duty. Keep your honor. The old saying says "No one's dying words were ever 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office.'" No job, no amount of income, no financial freedom is worth losing your family. Do what you have to do to survive, to prepare for winter, but don't lose sight of *why* you're doing it. Kiss your wife. Love your husband. Play with your children. You will be building a kind of wealth that cannot be measured in Quickbooks.

This is, admittedly (for me anyway), one of the hardest financial lessons to learn, but look at it this way: You can't keep planting crops in the same field forever. You have to let the ground sit fallow, to regain nourishment and produce a great crop. Burning out at the office is the same way. Spend time with your kids. Take the time to fall in love with your spouse again. Remember why you're slaving away, and you'll help make it worth it.

House Tyrell -- Growing Strong

And that's what it's all about. Save your money. Prepare for winter. Never let the word get you down. Pay your debts. Remember your family and what's truly important. It's all about strength. Strength of character, strength of conviction, financial strength. The ability to weather life's storms, to enjoy your retirement when it comes, to help support your children into college and adulthood, and eventually to leave a legacy of security for your heirs. 

Not that you'd learn any of THAT from Game of Thrones. Boy a lot of people die in these books. But, that's neither here nor there. Financially? These principles are strong. Look to them. Learn from there. Enjoy your life. 

And go read these books. They're pretty awesome.

And there's a lot going on in the TV version too. Hubba hubba!