Blogging in Germany: The Impressum

Paragraph Symbol - ©Can Stock Photo Inc. / froxxThere are many blogs on the internet where the blogger prefers to remain anonymous, at the very least he or she prefers not to tell the World exactly where they live.

For what ever reason that may be, they use an anonymizer service to register their domain, or rent themselves a post office box and use that for anything where they have to give a real address.

Considering Germany’s attitude to privacy and especially to services like Street View, you would think that it would be possible here as well, wouldn’t you?

Of course not. [Read more…]

Blogging in Germany: Google Analytics and IP addresses

Bloggers in Germany generally have a hard time with all the regulations.  Over the next few days, I’m going to explain some of them and what they mean for us.

A graph - ©Can Stock Photo Inc. / pashaboAnyone in the blogging business will probably tell you that statistics are an important part of running a blog.  Not to the extent that you are checking them every hour, you understand.  But at the very least you need some decent figures on how many visitors you receive each month and how often each of them visits the site.

Getting more advanced, it is also good to know which posts were read the most, how the site was found, eg. in a search engine, and just generally trends that show whether the traffic to the site is going up or down.

Most providers in Germany offer this kind of service when you rent your webspace or server, but the quality of the statistics differs widely.

Anywhere else in the World, you would probably say “so what?” and install Google Analytics, a tool that offers you statistics about almost everything happening on your website.

But not in Germany.  At least, not unless you want to take a risk. [Read more…]

Would you pay for information on blog building?

After I recently purchased a WordPress plug-in to automatically add affiliate links to my blogs, I was offered a further product from the same author: the $365K Blog Traffic Formular.

It is the sort of e-book that I see advertised so often, and I always wondered what sort of “secret” information these books contained, that I did not already know.

Until now, I had not even contemplated actually buying one, but this time my suspicion got the better of me.  I wanted to know what all those professional bloggers had said and was prepared to take a gamble, after seeing the quality of programming that had gone into the plug-in.

My first reaction was one of disappointment, because after making the payment I was forwarded to a screen, which told me that the e-book contained all the interviews with the bloggers, but it did not contain the tools needed to carry out the steps that they recommended.  This was going to cost me another $67 (apparently the tools are worth over $200) and this time I declined, feeling rather cheated.  Then I was offered a slighly smaller package for $47.  Again, I declined, and was finally able to download the e-book.

Now, the book itself is actually rather interesting.  There are some interviews where I felt, that I did not know anything new, and others where I actually gained a few ideas and even some links to tools that I had previously not been aware of.

Therefore, I would say that it is probably just about worth the $37, and anyone who has been running a blog for a while should consider buying it.  It is not a guide on blogging if you are just starting out.  And you will need to decide for yourself, whether you want to invest in those tools that will inevitably be offered after the initial purchase.

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