The idea behind maintaining a blog for business purposes is to obtain a lot of traffic and RSS subscribers. This helps whether you have monetised the blog itself, or use it to drive traffic to another website. 
But more than just providing a portal for visitors, you can do a lot with the information you obtain regarding the visitors reaching your blog. Here we look at locating and using your blog traffic statistics to your best advantage.
Finding Your Blog Traffic Statistics
You can access a lot of information from various places, depending where your blog site is hosted.
One way is to access your hosting panel, such as cPanel. This is a statistics program offered by many hosting companies. There you will find the URL address of each visitor, which hosts they came from, what browser they used, how long they stayed on your site, what pages they entered and exited on, what sites referred them to your blog, and what keywords they used to search for your site. There are many more statistics and the listings can all be drilled down to provide further information.
MyBlogLog is a great place to sign up as a member and add your blog’s URL. It is part social networking, part statistics program. MyBlogLog aggregates all of your memberships at various sites on the internet, everything from Twitter to social bookmarking to eBay. This provides a way for others to find you and read your content. It also gives you a list of every user who accesses your profile and allows you to find them throughout the net, too. Users can include their email address for contact, as well, and add a widget on their sites that shows latest activity and clickable thumbnail photos.
If you have a hosted WordPress blog, you can easily find a list of all subscribers by clicking on ‘Users’, then ‘Authors & Users’. The list supplies the user name and email address, and additional information such as website and messenger IDs, if provided.
With a Blogger blog, you can compile a list of followers who have a Google profile. Add this widget to your blog and you can access the user’s profile information, including an email address and links to other Google services.
Don’t forget Google Analytics to check your blog traffic statistics as well, it’s a great service with loads of information.
How To Use The Information
Blog traffic statistics can provide more than just a subscriber mailing list. They give you vital clues as to what posts are most popular (as determined by number of comments, most hits, largest number of entries, etc.), and what keywords are being used to find your site. Take this information to hone future posts designed to gain additional traffic.
Take a look at referring sites, too. These sites are excellent places to exchange links, or add a comment.
The more you know about your blog traffic statistics and your visitors, the better you can provide content that is meaningful and targets the right keywords. And don’t forget to contact your subscribers, they have already expressed an interest in your blog so these are great leads for your products or services.
About Sean Rasmussen
Hi Sean,
I love my blog traffic statistics. I can see clearly which posts are more popular and where my traffic is coming from. It helps me to see which of the social networking sites are sending me the most traffic.
This way I feel like I can spend my time where I’ll get the best results. Sometimes though the need to check my stats is like an itch that has to be scratched. I really have to resist the urge to check them every time I login to my blog especially if it’s after I’ve published a post.
Hi Sean,
I too like Jazz, find using my google analytics information very useful. It helps me understand where my traffic is coming from, & make informed decisions on my blog.
I know I’m only scratching the surface with Google Analytics & MyBlogLog, and its something I want to learn more about.
Google Analytics is certainly a great tool guys, and yes, it can be quite tempting to go and check those stats a little more than is necessary
I know what you mean Sean. Initially when I first discovered the power of GA I can admit that I spent way to much time looking at stats. You can really get carried away looking at every little detail.
As you stated Sen, now I really try to focus mainly on the keywords used to find my site or a specific post and the referring sites. This way I can play on the best keywords to increase search traffic and focus more time on forming closer relationships with the best referring sites.
Way to go Cemil, there are lots of ways to use your stats to your advantage, other than just checking traffic numbers
I think it’s really important to keep an eye on your statistics – and sometimes it’s hard not to over-indulge in checking them
With the statistics you can figure out what works better and repeat it. This way you can learn from your own little (and big) successes all the time.
This is something I really haven’t focussed on at all, but I love these little “Ah-Hah!” moments! I’m checking out MyBlogLog as I write this – it came up with my account automatically when I clicked the link in your post Sean – I don’t remember setting up that account, so I guess it was created via Yahoo when I did my details there earlier this month!?..
I know I have a lot of work to do learning how to keep track of my blog stats, doing social bookmarking, etc, to able to maximise & leverage my efforts in the future. Sometimes it seems such a long road!.. One step at a time..
Hi Sean,
Thanks for this great advice. I don’t really check by blog traffic statistics very regularly but it make sense to do so. Also I have heard about the cpanel but didn’t realise I coudl acces my traffic statistics from there. Very helpful.
Hi Sean
I haven’t got my blog up to a stage where it is up and running properly yet however this is very good information and important to know. I will definitely be a statistics checker for sure.
Thank you.
Stick at it Elly, persistence always pays off in the end! : )
Apart from WP Stats and Analytics I havent used the other two places you suggested – and I never realised that my hosting CPanel stores that type of information! Something else I have learn from reading this great blog! Knowing what is being looked at on your site is soooo important so that you can work on expanding this area.
I plan on starting to use keyword analysis soon- my blog is fairly new so now I’m just trying to get up content, but it is interesting to see what works for drawing traffic and what doesn’t. After I have enough data I’ll certainly use it to figure out exactly what works best and do more of that. I’m tracking my stats too and writing about it, so that others can benefit from what I’m learning. Here are my monthly updates if you want to take a look: