2 essential tools for monitoring the growth of your blog

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, then did it really make any noise? How do you know? Similarly, if you write your heart out on your blog but nobody reads your words, have you really used your voice? We've already said you'll need to spend time building an audience by letting people know what you've written is there to read. But how will you know if anyone is reading?

Naturally, the internet makes it simple.

In fact, you absolutely cannot build a sustainable blog that grows in value to you unless you are monitoring your visitor flow. Over time, you will learn and implement many techniques for letting people on the web know that your content is out there and encouraging them to visit. Monitoring your site visitors helps you see whether those efforts are working or not.

This post covers two essential tools for monitoring your blog's traffic growth that we're using on the ourwwworld team blogs: Sitemeter (which you need to install yourself) for monitoring daily visitor traffic, and Feedburner (which I'm planning to install for you) for monitoring the number of those visitors who choose to become your blog's regular followers.

1. Sitemeter

Sitemeter is a free and easy statistics tracking service that I've used for years. Since I personally want to track how much traffic we're getting as a team, I've already installed an ourwwworld team sitemeter on this blog and all of the team blogs at the bottom of your sidebar.

If you click on where it says "xx visitors since October 27, 2008" in the sidebar of your blog, you'll come to the summary page for all of our traffic together. From there if you look on the left for "page ranking" and click on entry pages, you can get a quick idea of how many visitors (out of the last 100) entered the ourwwworld team pages at your site. Referrals is another link I use often, since it allows me to see where on the web our traffic is coming from. If I share a link to a post on one of our blogs at facebook, for example, I can see at sitemeter whether anyone has clicked on it.

Since I'm also interested in seeing information about traffic to my own blog in finer detail, I've installed a second sitemeter at the bottom of my sidebar that's only monitoring my own pages. I would highly recommend that you also install a second sitemeter that monitors only YOUR blog, and the earlier the better. It will take you about 5 minutes to sign up for a free sitemeter account, get the html code for blogger and install it on your blog.

Installing gadgets on your blog is something you need to get used to doing. This one is easy practice (and chances are by the time you read this, sitemeter and blogger will have conspired to make it even easier). When you've signed up at sitemeter, you'll need to find the link in the manager panel to get your html code and copy it. Be sure to get the code that's for blogger. To install the code on your blog, follow the steps below:

1. log into blogger and view your blog
2. click customize at the top right of your screen
3. click on add a gadget in your sidebar
4. a window will open. In that window, choose "html/javascript"
5. paste in the html code from your sitemeter account into the box that appears
6. add a title similar to "christinaswwworld stats" if you want
7. click save.
   

Important to remember is that on blogger, any new gadget you install will always appear at the TOP of your sidebar. On the customize page, you can drag the elements in your sidebar up or down to reorder them. Once you've moved your new sitemeter code down to the bottom, click save again. Then view your blog to make sure it looks like you want it to, and you're almost done.

If you are usually on the same computer when you work on your blog, it's a good idea to exclude your own visits from being counted. If you are working from webcafes or always changing computers, then this isn't possible. But if you're regularly using the same computer then click "ignore visits" in the sitemeter manager panel. There, you can and should set your account to ignore visits from your browser, visits from your IP address, or both. Now, whenever anyone (including you) visits your blog and clicks on the sitemeter icon you just installed, they'll be able to monitor and analyze the growth of your blog's traffic from people other than you.

(btw - from 15 September until yesterday, I was monitoring all of us through the christinaswwworld sitemeter, where you can still see our history from the past 30 days. As of yesterday, though, that account is now only monitoring traffic to my christinaswwworld blog.)

2. Feedburner

While Sitemeter can tell us a lot about who has visited your blog, feedburner can tell you how many of your visitors are choosing to follow your blog and be alerted whenever you post something new. Feedburner also helps you deliver your content to those people in a number of ways, including by email (which blogger doesn't automatically do), and tries to help you consolidate statistics on people who are following your blog feed through all kinds of websites and services that it can be accessed through.

In the blogging world, the number of people following your feed is a key measure of your blog's financial value. If your blog has many followers, it becomes easier to generate a response to fundraising or income generating activities through your blog. You can even sell your blog if you're ever tired of it someday and earn thousands of dollars if your feed has a healthy list of followers. Of course, your number of followers will grow much more slowly than your traffic, so it's never too soon to offer your visitors as many ways as possible to start following you. In fact, one of my pet peeves is finding a blog that I want to follow, and not finding a way to easily do that. Offering your feed to your visitors is critically important.

Setting up feedburner to work for your blog is a bit technical (which is another way of saying I don't know how to explain it to you well.) The first time I used it, someone else set it up for me. Now that I've learned how to do it myself, I'll be installing it for you on the ourwwworld team blogs this week.

Once it's installed, it will be important for you to know where to find your feed address. It's often asked for when you are signing up for the various blog widgets, communities and directories that you'll come across while building a sustainable blog. Look in the sidebar of this blog, and scroll down until you see a link that looks like this:

subscribe in a reader

I'll be installing a very similar looking link on your blog.

In the future, whenever you are asked to provide your blog's feed address anywhere on the web, simply right click on that link to copy the link location, and paste it wherever you need it. Your feed link will undoubtedly look something similar to this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ourwwworld.

I'm going to play for a while with ways that feedburner can help us to promote your content on other websites like LifeInAfrica.com, and at the end of our experiment (more on that in an upcoming post) I'll be transferring the feed's ownership to you for continued monitoring of your subscriber growth. In the meantime, I'll try to post regular screenshots of how all of our feeds are doing that can help you get an idea of how we're all doing on subscriber growth.

Please post any questions, challenges, or comments on any of the above in the comments section below. I'm happy to help further if I can.

Here's to your blog's sustainable growth!

.