Gadgets and Stats and Blogging, Oh My!

Far from being an expert at any of the "high-techie" aspects of blogging, I do pick up some tricks of the trade along the way. If I see something that I think is interesting and/or could be helpful in my desire to "spread the news" about my blog posts, I try to figure it out, look for tutorials on-line, or just plain ask the person with the fuction I would like to have how to do it.

I haven't had anyone tell me to figure it out on my own! Quite the contrary! I have found without exception that bloggers are very helpful and supportive of each other. So I am going to act in kind and share the few tips I've learned in an effort to pay it forward -- or backward -- or whatever:-)

*I installed a gadget called a Stat Counter on each of my blogs. It measures how many visitors I have at each blog on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and since I began the blog. I didn't do this because I wanted to feel good (or not so good as the case may be:-) about myself. I am, of course, interested in knowing how many people I'm reachng, but I had another reason:

*****I am going to track over time which blogs have the highest traffic on certain days. In other words, so far one of my blogs had almost double the normal number of hits on both Saturday and Monday. I'm going to track the pattern for a few weeks on a the blogs.
*****Once I determine the heaviest days in terms of visitors, I'm going to post some "teaser" posts or begin a series on one of the heavier traffic days. Then I'll announce that the next installment will be published on XXX, one of the less busy days. My hope is that this will bring visitors back to the blog more often.

*I also recently installed a Share This button. Each time I make a new post I click on this button and a window opens to allow me to share my post (post a link) at several (many) social networking sites including, myspace.com, facebook.com, twitter and others. That means that every time I post something, a host of people will receive notice of it and I don't have to email people or manualy post a link on all these sites.

I have been offering my services locally to help other Christian writers set up their blogs, help them with functionality, etc. As I stated, I am far, far from an expert! But I have more than a basic understanding and am more than willing to help others. We're all in this together!


Watch for the lightbulb in future posts! These will be the posts where I share the "cool stuff" I've discovered. If there is a function or a feature you would like me to look into, leave me a comment. I'm game to try to figure it out!