I've written a bit lately about how I track people on my blogs, and people keep asking for a better explanation of it! So here goes.

First of all, you can use sitemeter to tell you how many people come and which websites refer them. It's free, and it's fun! You can upgrade to a more professional program, but I don't find it's worth it. And many other programs run on sitemeter statistics, so it's a good one to have.

Just go to www.sitemeter.com and sign up, and follow their instructions. You'll have to modify your template a bit, but that isn't that hard to do, and they explain exactly where to paste the code. Now you can count your visitors!

I also signed up with blogtopsites, which is how I get that rank on the left hand side for Top Parenting Sites. It relies on sitemeter stats, and it's kind of fun to see that rank go up and down. It starts at 0 again every Sunday, so it's your rank for just that week, so if you have a post that is linked to a lot, you can see yourself skyrocket!

You can go find Blog Top Sites here.

Now, if you have Google Ads and you want to track how they are doing, or if you want to track how people come to your site with a little more accuracy than Sitemeter, I like Google Analytics. They come up with slightly different numbers, but they're both good. Google Analytics is what I use to figure out which blog has referred to me the most in this month, and which search engine terms people are using to show up here.

And so far this month, I have a new winner for my book giveaway contest as to which blog is referring me the most traffic! But it's only the 15th, so I won't announce it until the end of the month! If you want to win one of my books, just blog roll me, and I'll announce it early in November!

It can be really addictive to check your stats constantly, but it is fun to see where people are talking about you. Another great one for that is Technorati, which tracks all the incoming links from other blogs to your blog. So you can see what your rank is! You can find that one here. Again, it's just a way of seeing who is reading you and talking about you. And if people are commenting on your posts, and linking back, you can see what they are saying.

So I hope that helps! Sign up for some of them, and see what happens!

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Labels: blogging, Works for Me Wednesdays