The life blood of any blog is regular traffic and getting more traffic can become a bit of an obsession for bloggers. The thing to remember is that we don't want any traffic - we want targeted traffic - visitors who are searching for and interesting in what we have to say and we need to be able to monitor where they have come in from.
Not knowing where your traffic is coming from means you don't know which traffic generation methods are working. Most bloggers make no effort to track their traffic and are just grateful for any visitors to their blog but if you want to succeed as a blogger eventually you need to do more than that. You really need to track.
Tracking your traffic doesn't need to be complex and can be done very easily. You can invest in scripts and services that will track your blog. These vary from the cheap to the expensive, the good and to the brilliant.
A simple traffic tracking method that is free to use is use Google Analytics. Using your gmail email account you sign up and add the domain name of your blog. There are several plugins that you can use to add Google Analytics to your blog. Here's one. (http://yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics/)- go into your plugins area of your blog and search for it.
The complexity of using Google Analytics means you can find out so much about your blog but it may initially confuse you but that goes away the more time you spend analyzing the results.
Firstly you have to add the code to your blog. This code is unique for each of your blogs and needs to be inserted inside the plugin you installed. Once it is reporting data, you will be able to take a look at where your traffic is coming from and how long they stay reading your blog.
Analytics will report on all activity on your blog and even go as far to overlay where people are clicking to help you understand the activity taking place.
One of the biggest benefits of Analytics is that it can provide goal tracking to track sales and sign ups to lists. It can be a bit tricky to get working behind scripts and membership sites, but is worth using.
The big appeal to most bloggers is the fact that it has a lot of features, more than many scripts and is completely free. Of course, Google get to understand exactly what happens on your website, but that is a small trade off for such in depth analytics.
Using Google Analytics will give you a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from and what it is doing on your site and from studying that information you can improve your conversion rate, and opt in rates - two things that are a crucial part of any blog.