Well established blog sites are aware of the importance of understanding their audience (readers). Beginner bloggers may find it difficult to understand their blog traffic. Simple and free tools such as Google Analytics helps to better understand an audience by providing figures and graphs of their behavior.

Ask yourself the following questions:
Who reads my blog?
How many posts do my audience members posts?
Where does my traffic come from?
How do I group traffic so that I can see trends?
How can I get new visitors to return?

Analyzing your sites traffic can help a blogger decide on the most appropriate topics to post. It also helps target the content’s promotion. Optimizing time spent on activities such as on social bookmarking sites, blog catalogs or forums will free up time to actually write suitable content.

Example of a Traffic Analysis: Where does my traffic come from?

• Search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL
• Social bookmarking sites – Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Shoutwire
• Direct traffic – visitors who directly enter a blog without being referred by another site
• Blog catalogs – Bloglines
• Social media – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace
• Other blogs and websites – single blogs and individual websites that are linked to your blog.

Blog Tips

• Analyzing your traffic is important to understand your traffic, and to decide where you need to spend your valuable time.
• Search engines count for the majority of a blog’s traffic, so allocate some time for basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Google outperforms any other search engine, so spend some time optimizing the Google crawler and your image tagging.
• Good content will get you backlinks, increase your PageRanking and return higher traffic from search engines
• Social bookmarking sites are an important traffic source, but take more work.
• The higher your direct traffic, the more successful your blog.  
• Traffic volume is not the single most important factor in analyzing your audience.

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