Tracking your Blog

Once you have a blog setup, the next thing you should do is track the traffic to your website. This allows you to understand how many people are viewing your content and how much traffic its getting.

There are many services on the internet that allow you to track the traffic to a website. I will just name a few:

• Google Analytics
• StatCounter

Since I am using Blogspot/Blogger which is a Google product, I decided to use Google Analytics.

Setup

Google Analytics is really easy to setup. I found this blog which explains how to setup Google Analytics for a Blogspot Account.
Setup is really very simple.
These are the steps at a very high level:

1. Sign up for a Google Analytics account.
2. Copy the code snippet from Google Analytics into your blog. This allows it to be tracked by Google.
3. Go to Google Analytics and check that the snippet has been deployed correctly. I read somewhere that you have to allow 24 hours for Google to initialise things before you will be able to view some results.
   

Results
I was very impressed with the results that Google Analytics provides.

• Simple and easy to understand graphs and data.
• But also allows you to drill down into more detail.
• There are lots of different KPI (Key Performance Indicators) which you can use.
• Shows from which part of the World the viewer came from.
• And lots more other interesting details
  

Twitter

I wanted to share a few thoughts about Twitter. Twitter is actually a very good service. It provides a means of sharing information. I have learnt a lot by using twitter. My general IT knowledge is getting better day by day and you learn lots of new things. Its very addictive once you start using it.

Twitter is quite different from a blog. Since twitter restricts the tweet to only 140 characters, it encourages you to tweet often about things that you would like to share.
On the other hand blogs allow you to write as much as you want and include different types of media (pictures, videos). Therefore writing blogs requires more thought. So you might notice that people tweet much more than updating there blog.

So for more up to date news, twitter is good.
Examples of some news company's that use twitter:

• The New Zealand Herald: http://twitter.com/nzherald
• CNN: https://twitter.com/cnn

Twitter is also used as a means to exchange URLs with the help of URL shorting services like tr.im, is.gd just to name a few.

But if you want detailed information, then you will get that from a blog. So blogs and twitter kind of serve different purpose.

Another nice feature of Twitter is that it keeps track of all the people that you are following your tweets and all the people that you follow.

Twitter is one of the biggest things happening on the web. If you read feeds about technology, twitter is mentioned lots, much more than facebook. Its cropping up in magazines, radio, you name it.

Those are just some ideas I had about Twitter and blogs.

My twitter details and updates are on the side of my blog.