Last time I mentioned using feedburner.com to burn your blog, which gives you easy RSS subscription management, email subscription management, and some statistics on how people are using your blog. I want to build on that post with some more ways to monitor how your blogs and websites.
The first requirement for me is the price... FREE! Because I am not making any money doing any of this, it is important that the services are both free and useful. Here are some options to consider.
Statcounter.com is a great website for tracking standard statistics such as number of unique visitors, number of page loads, or search phrases that were used to find your blog or website. It is easy to sign up for a free account, and place a small snippet of HTML on each of the web pages you want to track. You can track the path that users take through your site grouped by user which makes it easy to find what is working well in your site and what users are not finding. Another neat feature is tracking the city/country of all your visitors. I love seeing the list of visitors to this blog from the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, Indonesia, France, New Zealand, and dozens more. And by the way, thank you all for your continued support.
Quantcast.com is an interesting site that tracks demographic information about your visitors. I have not started using it, but I read about it in Randy Ingermanson's ezine through his website advancedfictionwriting.com. Through quantcast, you can get a visitor breakdown on gender, age group, income, and more stats that are not commonly available through site trackers.
Start simple. If you only have time to do one thing online, I recommend setup one blog, feedburn it, and setup statcounter to monitor the results. That's what I did, and it is a great learning experience. If I ever get to the point of being a published author, the idea is to have already mastered the online marketing world so I don't have to hire it all out to others.
Because if there is one thing I have learned from the experts online, as the author, you are the one that will be most responsible for marketing your book.
And for my writing update, I only finished one scene this week. I'm a self-declared slacker, but I'll make up for it.
Until next time, let's keep on writing.
www.jhughthomas.com
www.myspace.com/jhughthomas
Sunday, December 7, 2008
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1 comment:
Great information. I'm curious that alexa wasn't listed. It's one that it seemlingly ubiquitous to web monitoring. Also, have you tried gostats? It's much more powerful than statcounter - and has no traffic limits.
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