Lsn #3: Is Anyone Reading My Blog? Hellooooo?

Your blog post is written and happily published. Now you sit back and wait for people to find it and read it. And you wait... and wait... and you never know if anyone is reading it. Hmm. There must be a way to know if people are reading it.

Let me interject right here that this assignment is optional. You do not have to implement this into your blog. In fact, I didn't apply it until I had published 9 blogs. I encourage you to read about it, but you do have the option to skip it for now.

You can easily add a visitor counter to your blog. Generally, those are viewed as amateurish by seasoned bloggers. But if you want one, then have one. There are many free counters. I've chosen to use Google's Sitemeter. Another one I've heard that's good is StatCounter.

Click the SiteMeter link above, and click "Sign Up".
Hint: I use the same username and password for all these Google applications including my Blogger.com account. It's just too much to remember by changing it each time.

You will receive an email with your username, password and instructions.

Log back into SiteMeter.com and click the "Manager" link at the top.
In the Manager window there are several options. You can start your counter at a higher number, (recommended), and you get the HTML code here (that will be used in the below steps.)

Just read the screen carefully and follow the instructions to get your HTML code. Then...

Open Blogger.com and sign in
Click the Dashboard button
Click Edit on your blog
Click the Layout tab
Click Add A Gadget
Click HTML/JAVA Script
Copy the code from SiteMeter and paste into this box.
Save and Publish
Take a look at your blog and you will see Sitemeter.
To check on statistical charts later, sign back into SiteMeter and review.

A more advanced tracking system is GoogleAnalytics.com. Sign up for an account, (it's free), and follow the very easy instructions. Again, you will copy HTML code from Google Analytics and paste it into your HTML code in Blogger, as you did above.

The code will resemble and look like mumbojumbo. If it frightens you in anyway, then don't go there. Just back away slowly. But mostly, HTML is simply text that talks to the internet so you don't have to.

And with that, I'll leave you to your work. Next lesson: Targeting KeyWords