NV07: Stats, The Forbidden Love

Oh the stats debate. As a blogger, you either love them, hate them, or don’t know about them. Once you know about them, you love them or hate them. Some people obsess over them. Personally, I’m half and half.

It’s nice to know, but knowing what you see is a whole other story. Then, what do you do with that information? It’s tough, but in the event that you want to make some money off your blog, sponsors want to know this information.

Interesting to note, if you use FeedBurner, they made some recent changes that caused a lot of people’s stats to go through the roof.

Honestly, Rebecca can speak to this matter way more than I can. She’s the one who has clued me into the power, and downside, of stats. You can find out how people are finding your site, but then you can also see what other people are saying about you, good and bad. Not the worst thing in the world because that opens up an avenue for discussion.

Recently, I had something I noticed off my stats, and it’s happening still today. So first off, let me say hello to all the people that are coming to my site for this post from this post on BuzzFeeds.com. My stats spiked the other day from their site because of something I wrote in December, but they linked to me as of a few days ago. Good or bad, that’s traffic. And more traffic is always nice.

There are a variety of tools that you can use for your site. Here’s the list, but you’ll have to Google them yourself: Sitemeter, Google Analytics, Hittail, Crazy Egg, Podstats, 103bees.com, MyBlogLog, AwStats, StatCounter, Reinvigorate.net, Clicky, Mint.