Boost Your Blog Participation Savvy with 3 Free Tools

Once you’ve built your blog you need to take advantage of three services that will really boost your awareness of who is reading what you’re writing.  Best of all…they’re all free!

Clicky

Clicky is a free service that allows you to easily track blog usage during the day.  It’s not hard to set up and is available even with Blogger.  I use it on all my blogs as a way to watch traffic and see what people are reading.  Here’s more about it and here’s how to integrate it into your blog.

Feedburner

Next, let me tell you about Feedburner.  One of the things you’ll definitely want to do is make it possible for your readers to sign up to get an update whenever you add a post to your blog.  Most blog platforms (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, etc.) have that as an included feature using their service.  They also make it possible for you to offer an improved capability through the free service Feedburner.  When I direct you to sign up to get the update…I’m using Feedburner for 2 of the 3 ways you can sign up here at MarkHowellLive.com.  Here’s more on the what and why about Feedburner.

Google Analytics

Another great free service that you’ll want to integrate into your blog is Google Analytics.  If you’d like to see where your readers come from and what they read while they’re on your blog…this is the best free way to do it.  It’s easy to install with pretty thorough instructions.

A Last Word on Tools

Admittedly, these tools may seem like an unnecessary addition.  After all, for a blog offering always-on info to your leaders…what more do you care about than that they can read what’s there?  And I guess that’s true as far as it goes.  But I’ll say this…with Clicky, Feedburner, and Google Analytics you’ll know what’s happening and how many of your leaders are actually reading what you write.