Maybe you have a small business and you blog about upcoming events, company news and sales.
Or maybe you love college football and you blog about the games, the players, the coaches.
No matter what you blog about, or who you blog for, you've probably wondered is anyone listening? It's an important question to ask.
If you're blogging just for yourself, then maybe it doesn't matter to you whether you get 1,000 visitors a day or none.
But, if you're blogging to try and increase traffic to your website and increase sales for your business...
then you have a real stake in how much traffic your blog is getting.
To track your blog traffic there are multiple paid as well as free analytics tools you can use to see just how many visitors and pageviews you're getting.
Not to mention the average length of time a user stays on your blog, whether or not users return to your blog and which search engines are delivering the most traffic to your blog.
A very popular (and FREE) analytics tool is Google Analytics.
All you'll need to do is create a free Google account and upload the html code that will be generated for you to your blog.
Better yet, if you're using a web based blogging platform like WordPress or Typepad you can install a Plugin that will do it all for you! For a basic tool to use with Blogger.
com try SiteMeter.
com.
Even if your traffic numbers are low, reading your analytics can be quite addicting, not to mention motivating.
Seeing a large number of unique visitors to your site one day will make you want to attract an even larger number the next...
When you get to that point, then it's time to start thinking about Search Engine Optimization.
You wouldn't buy advertising on a radio station without first asking your account rep the question, "How many listeners do you have?" If you're blogging...
you better be able to answer the question; is anyone listening?