After watching Tim Ferriss’ video on blogging I couldn’t help but give CrazyEgg a try and its pretty damn awesome.

I set up a mini test on FreshTrend.com which is another site that I run and the CrazyEgg software automatically tracks what visitors are doing on the page: where they click, what pages they go to next, where they came from, etc. It sounds on the surface like its not much different than Google Analytics, which is why I was skeptical. But Crazy Egg blows GA out of the water in terms of getting actionable results.

For example, this morning I setup a test of the site homepage to monitor the next 3,000 visitor and after just 300 so far I can already tell that I need to improve the bottom part of my pages since many people are actually reading through the whole post and then clicking the “Next” link (which is tiny). By making that bigger I bet I’ll drastically improve people clicking on that and thus keep them on the site longer. The beauty of CrazyEgg is that after I make that change I’ll be able to test it and see how well it works out.

Final analysis: Anyone serious about their blog should give CrazyEgg a try, even if you try for just 1 month you’ll learn a ton about your blog’s visitors.

Just goes to show how blogging about something that you love can really pay off in the end. No idea yet on how much the deal was worth but I’m sure the TrueHoop owners made out ok.

So what can we the average blogger take away from this? Well, a few things.

First of all check out TrueHoop, the site design is very plain and simple. Way too often bloggers overload the senses rather than just clearly communicating their thoughts to their readers.

Secondly TrueHoop has clearly done a great job of getting readers to participate in their conversations about the NBA. Each of there posts has a number of comments, most of which add to the overall site’s content.

And finally you might notice that TrueHoop has 0 (yes…0) advertisements on it. For many bloggers that’s just a crazy idea (me included), but it is interesting to note. TrueHoop is about the NBA, nothing else. Focus your blog on a specific topic and keep writing.