Blog Feeds and Analytics
If your interested in how many people are reading your blog, you need to obviously track visitors. This can be done quickly and cheaply using Google Analytics. Google Analytics used to require an invitation code, but recently Google made it freely available to anyone. After you sign up for an account, you simply cut and paste code into your blog template (usually the footer or the bottom of the page template) and off you go. Its not quite real time - usually 8 - 12 hours behind, meaning if I log in now (AM on Thursday), I will see the stats for end of day yesterday. Google Analytics tracks all the web stats that you’re used to seeing in your websites analytics program (assuming you have one). If not, you could use Google Analytics on your site as well as your blog.
Google Analytics won’t track the readers who view your content through their news readers. In order to do this, you need a tool like Feedburner. Feedburner is also free. When you create an account it takes the feed from your existing blog and turns it into a new feed. This new feed - in the form of a URL - can then be applied to your blog templates so when readers subscribe, they are actually subscribing to the Feedburner feed rather than your blogs feed (You can tell a Feedburner feed because it starts with feeds.feedburner.com/. Pay attention to how many bloggers do this). At any point, you can log into Feedburner and it will tell you how many subscribers your feed has.
It’s very important to note that if you’re one of those bloggers that likes to change your templates, or you are in the process of creating a new template, you will need to apply the analytics code and the Feedburner URLs to every template you use. If not, you risk missing web traffic stats or worse, having users subscribe to the wrong feed.
Hope this is helpful to those just getting started.
