When you operate a business of any kind, the most important part of your success could probably be contributed to tracking statistics. You need to have the run-down on your cold hard numbers. How else are you going to realize what is working for your business and what isn’t working for your business? How will you know what you need to change and what is giving you results? What are your customers doing and what are they saying?

A blog is much the same. There are a number of techniques I use to track meridiancrest. I want to outline some of the tools and services that I use to give you a better idea of how to give a little bit more to your visitors and give a little bit more to yourself (in your pocket).

Google Analytics

There are many ways to track your visitors and where they’ve come from or what they do while they are on your website. I mainly use Google Analytics to track referrals and unique visitors, but it has a plethora of other tools and options to give you many detailed statistics. It lets you know what content is performing on your blog and what subjects are not. When it comes time to start buying advertising for meridiancrest this will help track ROI and visitor performance.

Feedburner

Feedburner provides a consolidated RSS feed allowing your visitors to easily subscribe to your RSS feed– and more importantly to this article, it allows you to track your readers. Feedburner provides statistics on your readers from the day previous, but gives you a good idea of who is reading your RSS feeds.

Reports plugin for WordPress

This plugin from Tan Tan Noodles lets you see a quick snapshot of your Feedburner and Analytics statistics from your Wordpress admin console without the need to login to either. This is a nice plugin if you’re a compulsive stat-tracker like I am.

Crazyegg

I like crazyegg because it offers a useful “heat map” tool. This allows you to see where your visitors are pointing their mouse the most on your blog with a color-coded heat map. The most used points are characterized with a red, and the least a blue. This is beneficial for ad placement if you’re trying to monetize your blog and could potentially increase ad performance if you track these results efficiently. Crazyegg lets you track your first 5,000 visitors every month for free.

So, what are you using to track your blog’s performance?