There are many ways to track visitors to your blog. You could use a service like Nedstat which offers free page count analysis. If you look towards the bottom of the menu, you will notice a small and unobtrusive icon of a graph. If you click on that you will go to the site analysis page for Weblog Tools Collection. There are various other free counter services out there. Some of these are very intrusive and insist that they place a huge banner on your site along with the number, others prevent unauthorized access to the information. An interesting statistics site for bloggers is BlogPatrol.com They are tuned for bloggers and their statistics are very attuned to user tracking and click through evaluations.
There are some other interesting ways to track visitors. On my main blog, in which I use b2 as the CMS, I use a tool called b2stats This can be implimented through this b2hack from The Protagonists’ Blog I use it all the time and it gives me a fair idea of what is going on with the insides of my blog.
If you are not using b2 to blog, you could use the javascript equivalent of a referrer tracker. It is available for free from Downes This is probably the most popular link tracker available today. It gives you the last 24 hours’ worth of pages from which your blog was linked. Pretty neat and very very very easy to use. If any of you use other tracking tools, (I know MT has some interesting built in ones) please post a comment or register and add some posts. Hope these help some people.
Just another recommendation… I use sitemeter as can be seen at the bottom of my blog. It’s a free service and uses javascript and I enjoy checking out the referrals. It requires free users to have a small icon, but it can be invisable if the background is black or white. I use a green background, so I let it show up.
Hi Mark, thanks for mentioning our site, BlogPatrol. We recently added interactive 3D stats reports along with an updated site design. Later this summer, we’ll be releasing stats mapping as well. We’ve also launched a blog to help keep users informed of new features and system status at http://thepatrolblog.blogspot.com
Hi guys
My students and myself have just created a blog that tries to convince people to stay in school. We would love contributions from people who had had the experience of dropping out and who can attest to the
value of schooling. Email me if you have a story to tell!
http://stayinginschool.blogspot.com/