June 28, 2006

Links, Stats, and More Traffic

Morris over at The Greatest Blog Experiment has just started an interesting project. He is building a blog directory of sorts. According to his inaugural post, he'll add anyone to his directory who links back to him. I've done that and I am anxious to see what happens.

Since he's talking about increasing your traffic, it's worthwhile to talk about knowing how much traffic you're getting...

I have two different stat collection tools on my blog. The first one I got, StatCounter, gives me a weekly email about how many page loads, unique visitors, and returning visitors I got that week. The website also gives you graphs of traffic and LOTS more info. After you sign up, you add a short piece of code into your Blogger template to allow for the data collection. It's very useful and free.

My newest find is shown on my right sidebar near the bottom. Geo Visitors plots your last 24 hours worth of hits on a Google map. It is awesome. I love being able to see at a glace where traffic is coming from. It's also free and just a small piece of code to add.

Why would you want more traffic? Well, two reasons: If you have Adsense on your blog, the more traffic you get, the more pennies you make. If you don't have Adsense (I don't currently), the traffic figures may just be something you enjoy seeing. I am thrilled when I get an stat email that says I had 50 or 60 hits today. That's worth it all by itself.

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