Is your readership growing? Your blog on "Java - the Final Frontier" is coming along great. Your friends and colleagues say they like it. You've posted comments on any Java-related blog you could find, a few in blogs about other programming langauges and IDE-related stuff, and left links back to your blog all over the place. You've even, on a late night inernet search for an open coffee shop, left a comment on that Coffee Lovers blog saying "Sumatran with cardamom rules! Check out my Java blog. Java. Ha ha. Get it?".
I hope you only had decaf after that.
How do you know if people are coming to read your blog? Most people don't leave comments even if they have aha moments. They like what you wrote but do not mention it. How do you measure readership?
The simplest way is to use a web counter. Counters give you a running total of who visited the site. The main Sun blog site shows a list of the top visited blogs. Some blog engines keep some more information. Webroller keeps a list of referrers, sites from which people came to your blog, in its "referrers" tab in the blog management interface.
Visitors are like customers. Marketing people will tell you that the best customers are customers who will recommend you to other potential customers. Research shows that one of the best way to measure customer satisfaction is by how they answer the question "will you recommend such-and-such to others?". The blogosphere equivalent is the blogroll - that list of blogs you keep on your blog site referring to other blogs. To find out who else points to your blog, try going to technorati and entering the URL for your blog. The list that comes up is the set of blogs pointing to yours. Here's an example for Going Public. Obviously I need to get more people here.
But if you really want to track where people are coming from and what they're doing, consider using one of the site analytics services that are available (for free for small amounts of traffic) . On this site, I'm using Site Meter. If you sign up to site meter, it'll ask you a few questions about your blog then show HTML code you should plug into your blog template. Once it's there, any reader who comes by gets counted. The information counted includes: referring URL (How did they get to your blog?), domain (which company / country are they from?), geographic location if identifiable, exit URL (if they clicked a URL on your site to go somewhere else, what was that?), etc.
Want to see an example? Click on the site meter icon on the right hand side of this page. Ignore the summary page and click on "referrals" or "month" on the left hand side to get the referrals for the last 20 viewers and a summary of the number of visits or hits this past month. You can see the peaks on days I sent out emails or even what the readership dropped to once I stopped sending out notifications.
The information you can get is interesting. At the time of writing this, for example, a number of people go to this page because they knew the URL (i.e. using a bookmark or clicking on it from an email) or maybe their browser just doesn't report these statistics to site meter. Two of them found it on the blogs.sun.com main page where it lists new entries. One found it by going to google and searching for "Going public steps". At least one that I can see has this blog in his Google Reader list, one has it on a "my blogs" list in bloglines, and someone found it by looking for "idiot's guide to blogging" in google. In previous posts, many referrals came from an OpenOffice.org blog post that referred to this one.
You can see some more information about geographic locations in a related entry I posted on Travel Blogs .
Eran Davidov
Technorati Tags: Site Meter, Counters, Web Counters, Going Public, Eran Davidov, Travel Blogs
Upcoming posts:
- Stuart's guest post - Back scratching: Trackback links
- Shai's guest post - Dealing with inflammatory bloggers and comments
- Yael's guest post - topic undefined
- Amichai's guest post - Folksonomy and community based sites
- Interviews with open source developers
It was a very nice idea! Just wanna say thank you for the information you have shared. Just continue writing this kind of post. I will be your loyal reader. Thanks again.
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