Tracking Your Website Influence

Having any business where one does not track what they are doing is totally not very clever (the double negative is intentional). Nothing is worse for any business success than if one does not track their activities in order to know what works and what does not. Since we are specifically talking about online websites, we need to learn how to track our website readership in order for us to know exactly what our blog influence is.

That is the only way we can be able to fully monetise our websites through advertising. I would feel good with a webmaster who can show me the tracking of their website for a period of time rather than one who justs tells me I have 10,000 visitors a day.

Among the goals I had for this blog was to increase my readership to the site. One of the best ways to know if you are doing well in a goal that you may have is by tracking your goal. So as to one of my first goals which was to make my blog among the most viewed online, these are the tools I will be using.

1. Webste Traffic Statistics

It is very important for one to be able to track the traffic to their site. The more people you get to your website, the more likely you are to be a success online. At the same time, it’s good for your ego to know that there are people who would like to know what you have to say. Oh yes bloggers are vain.

Tracking your traffic should include the number of unique visitors to your site, number of pageviews , time spent on your site and even time spent per page. There are so many things to consider but they should all answer one question. I’m I improving in the number and quality of people who view my website? Some of the tools that I use are -

• Blog Statistics – If you are using any type of blogging platform, most of them will have addons to track your site stats. Typepad has an inbuilt traffic tracking system . For wordpress users, you can use the worpress shortstat plugin which should track you site adequatly.
• Cpanel Statistics – For those that have your own hosting, there are built in traffic stats software like webalizer and latest visitors. I personally like Awstats as it’s very easy to understand.
• Google Analytics – There is a lot now on the internet about google not being very nice to webmasters .However their google analytics is a good traffic analyser. And you are ever going to sell your website one day, having these tool will make it easier for you to show that your website traffic has been improving over time. It is very easy to join google analytics and with a gmail account it is automatic.
• Sitemeter – These are a great traffic statistics tool and can be free or premium. It is easy to customise and actually one of the most used traffic tracking software out there.
• Stats Counter – This was my first traffic tracking tool and also my favourite to use. It is easy to customize and use and a new beta version is coming up soon .

2. RSS Statistics

With the current webmaster shock after google page rank went all over the map, some webmasters have started using their rss statistics as a measure of how their websites are doing. For me ,the higher the rss statistics ,the more authority a site has. I am still new in this internet business so I am yet to know how people can game rss statistics ,so in the meantime I shall remain the idealist and think that rss statistics are a good indicator of website readership and influence.

I am sure that must be others and you know of them just let me know , however I only use Feedburner for both tracking my subscriptions and even getting subscribers through rss and email. So far I like it and for those with large readership, one can also monetise their feeds.As for tracking my feed subscribers, it does the job adequatly .

3. Links To your Site

Yes it is true, the more links you have to your site, the better is your site influence. The internet is made up of networking and when bots visit your site having been directed from another, you have more authority and the larger the amount to your site, the more bots are re-directed to you and as such with good link building, your site influence can just explode. It has not exploded here yet, but we are working on it. Some of the tools that you can use are

• Technorati Rank – Everyone seems to like this one .The idea is that if someone favourites your blog, they are voting for it’s quality. Ok that is the idea, but the reality is that it is probably one of the most misused tools on the internet. For example ,right now I have 0 favs and 0 authority, please add me to your technorati favs and see how fast I can rise in the ranking.
• Yahoo backlinks – Join yahoo developers and use the yahoo site explorer feature. This should give you an idea on who is linking to you .Or you can simply use the following in your yahoo search bar link:http://yoursitename.com and it should give you a better link tracker than trying to use google who no one seems to be able to understand.
• Blog Juice Calculator – For those that use text link ads, it is important to use the blog juice calculator. Blog Juice is determined from your Bloglines subscription, Alexa rank, Technorati rank and inbound links in Technorati. Now if you ask me that calculation needs more to it as we all know alexa and technorati can be abused but hey we are only stating the tools you can use to show your blog authority.
• Social Meter – Now if you want to really know that a particular way of marketing your site is working, I would suggest you use social meter. Social Meter measures where you can be found online in the ways shown below. I believe this is the best tool and I wanted to test it and just promoted this site on sphere over the weekend and below are the results. And you cannot game it.

I know I am going to be asked about google pagerank and alexa and all I can say is that, good luck trying to figure out what those want . I believe that my work is to track my success and failure online and having those two arbitrary traffic tools does not help me in any way. Good luck everyone with tracking your traffic and website influence.

 

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