You’ve no doubt seen the little Extreme Tracking icons at the bottom of websites that track traffic to the site. I’d like to share another tracking service you may not be familiar with as most people run it invisibly (it doesn’t require you to run a logo banner on your site). It’s called Statcounter. It’s a free service though you can subscribe to the service to get added features. You just put a strip of code into your site and it tracks your visitors for you, letting you know such helpful things as how many there are and where they are coming from. What I really like about Statcounter is the Control Panel you log into, you can have several projects (separately tracked websites or pages) from the same account and see them all at a glance or click on each one for more detailed information.

Here’s a screenshot looking at Statcounter’s one week visitor traffic graph. It is showing page loads (or hits as often called) in green and unique visitors (actual number of people visiting your site) in blue.

I had heard of FeedBurner for the longest time but never really took a minute to figure out what it was. I figured I had WordPress and it was creating feeds for me just fine. Well, FeedBurner not only gives you extra options on configuring and optimizing your feed, it also tracks your subscribers! So you can actually know how many people are reading your comic from your feed and where they are reading it from. FeedBurner recently officially acquired the popular WordPress plugin that redirects your feed to the FeedBurner URL you create.

First create an account and a feed at Feedburner, having it grab the feed from your site. Then get the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin here to redirect your feed to FeedBurnder. You still use and advertise your existing feed URL (http://yoursite.com/feed [if using permalinks like you should be]), the plugin just makes it redirect for you.

Here is a sample of some stats being displayed from a WordPress feed: