I started blogging in November to discuss online journalism, journalism education and other related topics.
Since mid-January, I’ve also been using the blog to fulfill an online journalism class requirement because everyone in class is required to maintain a blog.
Professor Sam Terilli, who spoke to my class Thursday about law and the Internet (see related video), brought up a point that one of my classmates, Josh Newman, mentioned on his blog Friday:
“[Terilli asked] the question that, I think, made most of my classmates (including myself, excluding Greg Linch) squirm a little. ‘How many people read your blogs?’ …Silence.”
Josh goes on to mention Google Analytics. This is a great service, but it’s only one way to measure how many readers you have.
I subscribe to all of my classmates’ blogs via Google Reader and would recommend that they utilize FeedBurner, an earlier suggestion (How to…use FeedBurner) that the class has been using, to keep track of their subscribers.
FeedBurner is great for adding an e-mail subscription widget, something our professor required, but that should only be a preliminary step.
Explore the different tabs in FeedBurner, specifically “Publicize” and “Analyze” — the latter of which shows you how many RSS subscribers you have. The number of subscribers is also available on the “My Feeds” page.
There’s a lot that can be said about the question of increasing blog traffic and readers, so I decided to divide my thoughts into shorter posts.
Stay tuned…
UPDATE, March 23: I clarified above that not all journalism students are required to blog — only the ones in the CNJ 442 Online Journalism class.
Other School of Communication students have their on personal blogs and may blog through the SoC’s Web site.
Also, I should have mentioned SiteMeter as another option for blog/site analytics.
