In today’s world of blogging and the web each small business has an opportunity for a voice in the marketplace. There are great blogging software applications such as Wordpress, Blogger, Joomla, and Drupal to mention a few that are free to use, three of those four are considered open source. That means that developers work on the application to invent, maintain and innovate the product for free so we can use it to get your message out to the world. 

So here you are sending out your message to would be followers, clients and participants (your community) and you have no data to tell you if your time is being well spent. Your first step would be to hook up analytics software (Revenflo uses Google Analytics, its free and packed full of info!) to see how many visitors are coming to your site each month. This will give you a good indication of how many visitors, which search terms, and overall engagement with your onsite content.

If your website is built in one of these content management systems they come with RSS built into the system. This makes it easy for visitors to subscribe to your information, each time you publish a new post it is pushed out from your site and can be subscribed to by your community in a  feed reader or aggregator. There are many of these on the web or you could also have the feeds come straight to your email inbox.

On-site analytics will give you great information about incoming visitors to your website but it will not give you the information about the outgoing content or RSS subscriptions broadcasting from your website. To track this data you will need a service like Feedburner, this is a Google product that monitors all of your outgoing feeds and gives you the ability to understand the behavior of your subscribers.

Tell me how you are tracking your website traffic or if you have questions about Feedburner or Google Analytics.