First off, let me apologize for my absence the past few weeks and for the dreary appearance of this blog.  It’s in a state of hiatus, but hopefully things should return to normal in the next week or two.

I know that there are a lot of blogs that are started that focus on very competitive topics.  Getting noticed in a field of thousands of other blogs or websites can be a very daunting task, especially if your blog is brand new to the field.  So what can a person do to help get a little exposure?

Try using social media, particularly Twitter.  Twitter is fast becoming one of the most popular forms of social media out there and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it became the social media leader in the very near future.

Using this blog as an example, if it weren’t for using services such as Twitter then the amount of visitors would be drastically reduced.  This site is centered on blogging with a focus on business blogging.  There are many, many other sites out there that are geared towards this topic.  These industry giants dominate the search engine results and so I would have to pursue ways other than search engines to attract visitors.  I chose Twitter.

Posting a blog update with a link in your Twitter stream can do wonders for your blog traffic.  Your new blog may be invisible in Google, but you can get the word out easily in the “twittersphere”.  As an added bonus, if other people like what you published, they may “retweet” your link which exposes your blog to even more people.

I have to add a word of caution to this: Don’t overdo it!  Promoting your website occasionally through Twitter is fine, but it turns people off when someone is tooting their own horn a bit too much.  Keep it in moderation and you should be fine.

So if you’re swimming in a sea of anonymity, look into using forms of social media like Twitter to get a little attention.

With any blog that I own or operate there are just a few things I want to know about the people who come to visit.  There are many, many different items of statistical data that I could analyze about blog visitors, but for the most part it really boils down to just 3 questions:

• Who are you?
• What are you looking at?
• How did you get here?

That’s it.  That’s all I really want to know.  I think you’ll find that these 3 questions cover the most important areas of visitor tracking and they also provide a good ruler to measure how well your blog is doing.

Let me break down these questions and explain what they mean to me:

• Who are you? – When I ask this I’m not after a visitor’s name or what they do for a living.  I want to know if you are a new visitor, a returning visitor, a search engine spider, etc.  User agents, IP addresses and browser cookies do a pretty good job of separating this info out, and this info can then be broken down into their individual parts.
• What are you looking at? – When someone is browsing through a blog of mine, I am interested in knowing which post they are reading.  Tracking this data for enough time will tell me what posts are more valuable or relevant to what people want.
• How did you get here? – I am always interested in knowing how people found their way to my blog.  Did they run a search on Google?  Direct visit?  Click on a link at another site?  Did someone email a post? This kind of information is invaluable in determining where my blog is being mentioned and how well known it is.

These 3 questions tell me almost everything I want to know that can help me provide a better blog for my visitors.  If I know how many visitors, what they’re looking for and where they’re finding me, I can better prepare my blog to provide blog visitors with what they’re looking for.

If you look at the answers to these questions for a while you will probably start looking into another important area, and that is why your visitors are leaving your site.  Looking at exit pages and the duration of visits can also be vital information in determining the health of your blog.

What things do you want to know about your blog visitors?  What do you use to help keep track of this information?