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Issue #062 -- Week 12/07/15-18/07/15
July 21, 2015
Hello,

Greetings and General Information

A warm welcome to our new subscribers! I wish you will find My English Club fun and instructive and I look forward to welcome you as a new valued member soon. Read, learn and communicate around the world!

Please feel free to contribute to these pages when you have a minute. They are meant to be a platform for exchanging ideas, stories and opinions - an ideal medium for practicing your English, which should be used to the full. Together, let's bring it alive, let's make it the welcoming community you wished for, when you joined. Use the Comments facility at the end of every page and start making friends worldwide.

You and your friends can always subscribe individually through the form on My English Club If anybody mentions to you that they are interested in receiving it, please tell them this, with thanks. Also, they can read the previous issues on Back Issues for English Corner E-zine. Of course, you can also unsubscribe at any point, by using the link at the end of any issue of the e-zine, should you wish.

Now, I am fortunate to be able to send you this issue a in time today. However... given my intensive travelling since our last e-zine, you will have to excuse my inability to create a new grammar lesson for you today. Shall we all take a little break this week, from learning English grammar?

Well, without further ado, let's start our other lessons today.

Month 12 ~ Lesson 46

We started studying three subjects back in September 2014: pronunciation and grammar for improving your communication skills, as well as website design and development, for those advanced students of ours who would like to apply their English to building a business online.

Once we covered the basics of pronunciation, we started a new course in reading, which we finished last month (March 2015). Following some recent requests, we started a section on educational games, to add the fun into your learning. I do hope you like these.

Until I'll have the time to write my e-books from these courses, you can enjoy our past lessons for free, as follows:

Pronunciation Lessons
Reading Lessons
Grammar Lessons
Website Design Lessons
Weekly Games

Grammar ~ Linking Signals for a Fluent Speech [1]


Today we have a new topic to ruffle with, for our grammar section of this e-zine: Linking Signals are an important part of our speech. Once you figured out what it is you want to say, first of all, you need to know how to start saying it in order to attract the attention of the person listening.

Review this matter here and then try your hand with the exercise at the end of the lesson.

Website Design ~ Analysing Traffic Stats


As we mentioned last time, SBI!'s Traffic Stats module provides monthly and daily stats. The monthly high-level stats cover three "big picture" categories...

• Visits -- the number of visits to your site
• Visitors -- the number of different people who visited your site (ex., one visitor could account for 10 visits that month)
• Page Views -- the number of pages viewed by all the visitors during all the visits that month. A single visitor might view only one page... or twenty.

By comparing your monthly "big picture" data, you should be able to see growth in your site's overall traffic. In the early month(s), you may feel discouraged... but it's worth persevering - you saw my example of reaching the third in Google after 2 years of working on it in my free time!

What About Google Analytics?

It's a good idea to add Google Analytics tracking code to the head of your pages (in BB2, click on the Head button and add it Sitewide). SBI!'s Traffic Stats are sufficient for your needs early on, and for basic tracking later on.

However, until then, let's start by investigating some Traffic Stats now.

Go to the TrafficCenter and click on the Traffic Stats link. Follow the online help as you check out the Summary by Month Report...


In the screenshot above, you see the "Monthly Totals" for Visits, Visitors, and Page Views on the right. The daily averages are on the left. By scanning your monthly data, you should be able to see "big picture" growth in your site's overall traffic. Your growth pattern will not be a straight line upwards. There will be a sudden burst of traffic, followed by flat or slow-growth months, followed by another burst, perhaps even followed by a down month or two. Now it's time to delve inside the Traffic Stats module. Click on the monthly links to get the following useful information...

• Daily statistics - visits, visitors and page views on a day-by-day basis, in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the total (ex., percent of total visitors).

• Most popular pages ("Top X of Y Total Pages") -- delivers page view stats on a per-page basis, with the page generating the most page views reported first. By understanding which pages are most popular, you better understand the needs of your visitors.

• Most popular entry pages ("Top X of Y Total Entry Pages") -- tells you which pages are the most popular "entry" pages. A page counts as an entry page when it starts a visit.

• Most frequent exit pages ("Top X of Y Total Exit Pages") -- shows the pages from which people leave your site. Some SBIers consider high numbers for a given page as "bad" because "horrors, people are leaving my site there."

• Mobile Statistics -- this tells you the percentage of visits and the average number of pages per visit for different "user agents," i.e., non-mobile (desktop and laptop) computers and a variety of smartphones and tablets.

• Referrer URLs ("Top X of Y Total Referrers") -- this tells you where your traffic is coming from. Note how much of your traffic comes from search engines, from Facebook, Pinterest, etc. -- that percentage should grow.

• Keyword Search ("Top X of Y Total Keywords") -- identifies which keywords people are entering into engines to find your site.

• Countries ("Top X of Y Total Countries") -- where are your visitors coming from? This is probably the least useful data, but it may prove useful... (Let's say you are British, and you discover that the vast majority of your audience comes from the United States. In this case, you may choose not to favour, but to favor US-English spellings.

Or perhaps you sell an e-book priced in US dollars, but half your audience comes from a Eurozone country. Consider offering an option to pay in euros.)

Well, this is plenty for now, about analysing traffic stats. Next time we shall take a chance at understanding click-through rates (CTR).

Game of the Week ~ The Open Mind Life Skills Discussion Game


Today I shall invite you to try your hand at the Open Mind Life Skills Discussion Game , another more complex one that I found for you this week, in the word games and quizzes section of the online Macmillan Dictionary.

Well, in this game, you will be faced with no less than 16 questions, prompting you to discuss about certain life situation. A bit like this:


The 16 questions are as follows:


... and again:


Now, if you couldn't read these questions clearly and, even better, if you wish to answer any of them and send your thoughts in, please do so by using this form:

Life Skills Discussion Game Form

I look forward to receiving them ... :-D

This is it for now, my friends!

I hope you find this information useful and not too confusing. Even though you're at the stage of building on it, have patience at this point in your learning and you'll be able to reap the fruit of your work later on, whichever aspect of our lessons you are concentrating on.

Please feel free to comment and suggest your ideas by replying to this email - I look forward to hearing from you. If you wish to chat either with me or with other members worldwide, go to My English Club .

Everybody, have a great summer holiday and a good week ahead, those of you who need to keep working for now!

All the best from me, until next time,

Lucia da Vinci

Founder of My English Club

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