As a blogger, you'll definitely want to pay close attention to what the traffic numbers are for your blog.
One of the first things you'll want to know is what kind of traffic you are getting to your blog on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The most standard way of determining this is by using your AWstats in your cPanel (control panel).
AWstats is free and generates advanced graphical statistics from web, streaming, ftp or mail server log files. Also, AWstats will give you standard information, such as how many unique visitors you're getting, how many hits you got total, when the search engine spiders visited last, and where your traffic is coming from.
Keep in mind that this kind of visitor tracking is only for self-hosted blogs. If you're using something like WordPress.com or Blogger.com you may not have access to this information, and will have to use other scripts or other methods instead. (Woopra.com and Google.com offer free plugins.)
Once you have visitor tracking information, work on improving your traffic flow by focusing on keyword research with Google AdWords. Typing in keywords that pertain to your page content will give you their strength (popularity) linked to page one in Google. Use the link to research your competition and generate ideas on how to improve your own keyword selection.
Another alternative to Google is Piwik.org. Piwik aims to be a free open source alternative to Google Analytics. It operates through a series of customized plugins for other platforms (e.g. Joomla, Drupal, Adobe, WordPress, etc.).
Alexa.com offers excellent free traffic monitoring statistics. Once you download their plugin on your browser's toolbar, you'll see the statistics for every page that you're currently browsing. Including: Alexa Traffic Rank Site (popularity ranking, both worldwide and domestic), Related Links (locating sites that are similar to the site you are visiting), Wayback (retrieves how a site looked in the past), Hot Pages & Searches (see what's popular on the web right now), Website Reviews (opinions on what other people thought of this site and write your own review).
Creating and managing the traffic flow to your blog is the most critical task that you must consistently perform on a daily basis. You now have the tools to make that job easier.
With over 25 years of experience, Thomas Reidy solves online-offline sales and marketing issues for entrepreneurs. Avoid being "road kill" on the Internet superhighway by getting his free report: "Internet Entrepreneurship Survival Guide" at http://ThomasReidy.com.
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