Track your visitors.

OK, so you have begun. You have set up your blogging account and determined your niche. You've found some webmaster affiliate programs, you have chosen a few free hosted galleries and you have created your first posts. Good for you! Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for checks to begin rolling in, right? In the words of that college football analyst, "Not so fast, my friend."

The first days of a blog are its most difficult. It takes a little while for people to even find you. When they do, they need to like what they see so that they will bookmark the site and come back again. They may stop by two, three or even four times before they buy. And - let's be honest - not everyone buys.

I would suggest that you develop a means of tracking the visitors that come to your site. There are several places that offer free site statistics. One of the best is called StatCounter. It has all the features you need to see how many people are coming to your site, what they are looking at while they are there, and what they are clicking on. With that information, you can begin to see what sorts of things are the most popular with your visitors and then tweak your site for maximum potential.

Frankly, StatCounter gives you a great deal more than just those basics. Want to know where your surfers are coming from? What keywords did they use in their search to find you? What page did they enter your site on? From what page did they leave? How long were they there? How many of your pages did they look at? You can also see what other sites are linking to yours, and even get a LIVE view of the visitors at your site at any given minute. No, you can't see them, but you can see everything that you need to know about their visit.

At this point, assuming you are a beginning blogger, you will undoubtedly be most interested in seeing the number of visitors increase every day. Over the next couple of days I will suggest some quick ways of doing that. Don't give up yet. Get yourself some free blog statistics softwareand start watching the traffic grow.