There are several ways traffic finds itself to your web site:

• Via your comments: You may have commented on someone else’s blog and included your blog’s URL in your signature to that comment. Someone may click on that link and find your blog.
• Search engine referrals: Search engines like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc., may have crawled your blog and included it in their index. Visitors may land on your blog through searches they make on the search engine of their choice.
• Via direct links: Your blog may figure in someone’s blogroll or a direct link in a post.
• Via directories of blogs: yes, just as there are directories, categorized by topic, for web sites, commercial and non-commercial, so there are directories for blogs. Also categorized by topic. Some of the better known directories are Technorati, Blogwise, and Blogflux. There are others that do more than just list blogs, they track your page impressions through a script or an invisible 1×1 pixel image that is pulled from their server. They then use this to give you a blogrank. Many bloggers wear this button or chiclet with pride. The referrals I have seen from these directories have been far and few, though. I think most of these come from those who are adding their own blogs to the directory and decide to do a search to check out their competition! But it’s a great way to get the search engines to find your blog as these directories are crawled bythe search engine spiders. Once you’re in and you have other bloggers linking to you, I’d recommend getting rid of these little chiclets. These chiclets add clutter to your blog. And quite frankly, if you write well and your posts are relevant, smart and witty, who cares whether you are ranked #1 or #241. Some people do and they need to get over it. Your blogrank is worth nothing if you can’t convert it to something worthwhile. But, I digress from the topic of this post, which if you haven’t figured out yet, is: Where my traffic comes from.
• Via Bookmarks: Someone visits your site and then saves your URL to a Bookmark or as a Favorite in their browser. Then there are social bookmarks, a fancy term for shared bookmarks, like del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, pageflakes; or someone may have even dugg your post!
• Via links in emails: Someone may have found your post so worthy that they sent your blog’s URL in an email to their friends.
• Yourself: A lot of your traffic comes from you. Yes, you! When you check your posts as soon as publishing them; when you view your comments; when you show off your blog to your friends and neighbors; when you surf your blog for that mutter paneer recipe you posted a year ago; and sometimes because you surf your own blog because you are your favorite writer.
• Search engine spiders or bots: In order to make your blog ‘findable’, it must be crawled. Search engine spiders are automated programs that grab the content of your blog and then save it in their database. It is categorized, indexed and ranked according to their special algorithms. For a long time, the only visitors you may have besides yourself, are search engine spiders.

Well, that about covers where your traffic may come from. Let’s hope that by my next post, I will have more human visitors than search engine spiders and that you will have figured out why you blog.

Why do you have a blog?

Believe it or not, many people have blogs because other people do. With click-and-publish technology, anyone can have a blog.

The oldest blogger I know of is 81 years old! She’s a real treasure. Hats off to her!

But why are you blogging? So that you can say: “Look, Ma! My own web site!” Or do you have a larger purpose? Figure that one out first. Once you know why you blog, it becomes much easier to explain why you need to know where your traffic comes from.

If you don’t know why, details about your traffic will be nothing more than a vanity factor.

If you know why, it’s gold in your hands, waiting to be converted into opportunity.

How do I know where my traffic comes from?

It’s not rocket science. Every web site or blog, whether on its own domain or not, can have its own web logs. With free hosted solutions like Blogger, WordPress, etc., the blogger usually does not have access to these logs; if access is available, the reporting is very limited in nature. Into the picture come client-side solutions that use javascript to route every click through their servers to give you the next best thing to your own web logs. These are called click-tracking solutions.

If you have a web site, your web host may make free statistical packages like AWStats, Webalizer, Urchin, etc. available. If you have access to your raw logs which you can download to your own computer, I recommend Funnel Web’s Free Analyzer. However, it may not quite do as complete a job for a blog as it might for a web site.

For blogs, I recommend using Performancing. The code is easily added to your template and within a couple of hours you know who visited your web site, whence they came and perhaps, why.

I am not a great fan of SiteMeter. The image that must be placed on the blog bugs me immensely. Off the bat, they have more features and reports than Performancing, but you can get those from Performancing if you are smart enough to use their API or smart enough to get hold of code that uses their API. As a starting point, Performancing is a much cleaner and user-friendly solution.

So go on over, click through to Performancing and get all beady-eyed, the way I do!