I admit to looking at my visitor logs several times a day. In fact, since I have two visitor counters on my blogs, I get to have a few extra peeks.
Yes, I knew you thought it was naughty.
After all, only hit chasers, and a few other less polite terms, check their visitor logs on a frequent basis. Right?
Well, even nice bloggers look over their visitor records, and the reasons are not entirely ego based. In fact, those trackings can be very helpful for both the blogger and the readers.
When you look at the the referrer portion of the visitor logs, it lists how a person found your blog.
They might have clicked from a link on another blog. A search on one of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search may have turned up your blog as result. A blog directory, where you dutifully submitted your blog information, might have sent a visitor your blog's way.
A message forum posting you wrote might have encouraged a message board reader to check out your blog for more of your writings and ideas. You might even have readers who arrived from an e-mail recommendation or the signature link placed on your own outgoing e-mail. As expected, you will even have some visitors who accessed your blog from your Atom or RSS feed.
All of those routes to your blog can and will appear in your visitor referrer logs.
Okay, so what does it all mean?
Well, I'm glad you asked. I like co-operative and helpful readers like you.
First of all, you know from links from other blogs, which blogs with whom you share a common readership. That reason alone could encourage you to link back to their blog. I like to click back through to any and all newly linking blogs to mine. I have found some of my very favourite blogs that way. All I did was notice that they had found me first.
It might even suggest that you contact the sending blogger with a personal e-mail introduction of yourself. It could lead to friendship or a business association.
I always believe that sending out an e-mail opens up an entirely new future, as an alternative timeline. Send the e-mail and you meet a new person, and possibly sending your future into an entirely new direction. Don't send the e-mail, and nothing happens at all.
One action. Two entirely different futures.
You will also have visits from search engine results. By receiving visitors to your blog from real life searches, you then know that your choice of blogging topics and posts are of interest to people in the real world. You know you are not sending out unread posts into the great unknown, never to be seen again, by any human eyes beyond your own.
Blog directory referrals are nice as well. You know that the time you spent submitting that blog description and even a keyword list was not wasted after all. Real people search for blogs in those free blog directories. I get at least one or two visitors from blog directories every day. So should you.
If you frequent the various blog message forums, and I know that you do, here are a few:
Blogger Talk Forum
Blogger Forum
Forum4Bloggers
Bloggerhub Forum
Weblogs Forum About.com
Yahoo Blogging Community
if you provide a signature link back to your blog, many readers of your posts will want to visit your blog. They will be interested to find out if your blog is as interesting and as informative as your forum posts.
Note that on forums, you should always be polite and strive to be helpful. Be sure to answer other bloggers' questions as freely and honestly as possible. Your reputation as a professional blogger could depend upon it.
Of course, a blog with an RSS or Atom feed will also find many visitors who visit their blogs in that manner. When you see the number of visitors who subscribe to blog feeds, it underlines the power of those information sending vehicles. They are very important, and getting even more so all the time.
Keep an eye on your visitor referrer logs and how and from where your blog visitors arrived.
There are many very interesting people on the other end of them all.
