Tools To Track Your Blogging Progress

It seems kind of silly to start a blog without knowing what kind of progress you are making on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

For me, it can be a great motivator to keep my blogs going because I can actually see the traffic results first hand.

How do I do it?

My primary progress (traffic) tracking tool is Google Analytics. While the results are always a day behind, Google Analytics provides by far the best traffic and visitor intelligence that I have seen.

Using Google Analytics is free and pretty darned easy to use. For a WordPress blog, you simply need to paste the Google Analytics code in your footer and verify the status (which means click a link when you have the code installed on your blog).

There are also plugins that can assist you with getting your code on your blog.

Since I use the Flexibility theme, there is already a place for Google Analytics built right into the theme.

Here are just some of things that you can easily find out using Google Analytics:

1. Absolute Unique Visitors. If you subtract this number from actual visits (which will be higher), you can determine how many of your visitors are repeat visitors for any given period of time.

2. Traffic sources. You can tell exactly where your traffic is coming from and how much: organic search engine traffic, articles, referring sites, etc.

3. Page views. You can see how many page views your blog has had, the average time spent on your blog, and the pages that have gotten the most traffic.

One of the things I really like is the graphical view you get for each time period (line chart or pie chart) for your traffic statistics.

But Google Analytics is not the only statistics tool I use. I also use this tool:

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Here’s why:

With this WordPress plugin, the overall statistics aren’t near as accurate as Google Analytics. But what I really like about this plugin is that you instantly know exactly which search terms or phrases were used to get to your blog (along with a link to the actual search engine page) in real time — they show right up in your blog Dashboard.

This really provides some great intel quickly on which of your blog posts are optimized well and which search terms are getting you the most traffic.

Without some way to access valuable statistical data, you are pretty much driving in the dark with your blog.

And that means…

You are far less likely to keep your blog going if you are unable to see some kind of results along the way.

Cheers,
Steve Roye
Online Business Consultant

About the Author/Founder of the IMS Blog

This former Navy Senior Chief (ret.) and professional entertainer didn't stop when he retired from the military...

Steve Roye is also an author who has also been an online business owner and consultant for almost a decade.

Now Steve focuses on helping others start or expand their online businesses.

Please check out the Featured Articles page for direct links to articles on this blog.

Last 5 posts by Steve Roye

• Entertainers Have The Edge When Building An Online Fan Club - March 11th, 2010
• 7 Secrets For Getting More Hits And More Traffic To Your WordPress Blog Now - March 8th, 2010
• The Lies About Making Money Online With Google Adsense - March 5th, 2010
• The Social Network Business Plan: 18 Wealth Strategies - March 2nd, 2010
• If You Don’t Understand Keyword Research, You’re Kinda Screwed - February 28th, 2010

Tagged with: google analytics • start a blog • traffic statistics • wordpress plugin

Filed under: Getting Started

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