Saturday, January 22, 2005

Might as well ride this wave ...

It seems that Yahoo! Singapore (and probably other variants of Yet Another Hierarchic Officious Oracle) has Knappster on page one for the search "blog track visitors."

In this particular case, instead of just gravy-training, I'll put in a few plugs.

Tracking visitors to your blog: If you host your site independently, there's a good chance that you'll have access to some pretty gnarly stat packages (AWStats and such). If you're using the Blogger/Blogspot option or one of the other "freebies," however, you're probably going to have to look for a third party provider. I like SiteMeter. Basic stats are free and include an abundance of information on who's visiting your site, from where, etc. They also offer premium packages with even more. Really, though, the free package is sufficient for most purposes.

Getting visitors to your blog: There are a number of blog-oriented "traffic exchange" programs out there -- basically, you view two blogs, and in return one visitor is sent to yours. I have accounts with three such services: BlogExplosion, BlogClicker and BlogCrowd.

Personally, I prefer BlogExplosion. Their system is nice, and they deliver the goods. BlogClicker I just started with, and it seems okay as well. I'm going to hold off on recommending BlogCrowd for the moment. At first blush, they've got a lot of cool features, but they've been slow on turning my credits into actual visitors, and their interface isn't very intuitive.

Of course, getting a visitor to your blog for the first time is just half the struggle. After that, you need to have content which makes the visitor want to bookmark your site and return to it. So I guess I'd better quit messing around and find something to write about besides "blog track visitors," eh?

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