Adding a Stat Counter to your Blog

Like most bloggers it's always nice to know more about who is reading your site, where they come from and what they are reading etc. This post will show you how to add an excellent free statcounter to your site which will give you access to a large amount of useful information.

This should be sufficient for 90%+ of bloggers. However, if you later find yourself being in the envious position of getting 1000's of hits per day then you can always look at a more powerful solution such Google Analytics which I will write about later on.

Ok, so how do we get some stats on our blog? For the purposes of this How-To I'll be using the excellent free service from Statcounter and assume you have a Blogger blog, although the technique applies the same to almost all the Blogging services out there.

First we need to create a Free Account with Statcounter.

1) Goto http://www.statcounter.com/ and register a free account. Fill out your info and click the Register button.

2) Now click the Proceed and Add a Project button.

3) Now fill out the Project Settings such as Title, Category and your Blogs link.

4) Click the Next button and then click the Configure and Install Button.

5) Now you can decide how you would like your stats to be displayed. Personally I like to keep my Statcounter hidden, but you can choose to have your counter visible if you so desire. Once done press next.

6) Next you select the blogging platform that your blog is on eg Blogger, Wordpress, Drupel, etc etc. Statcounter works on almost all platforms.

7) You will now be presented with a block of code that you need to copy so that we can paste it later.

8) Now that you have copied the above we now need to add this to your blogging platform. For this example we will use Blogger but Statcounter provides instructions for all the major blogging platforms. So we now head over to your Blogger Dashboard (http://www.blogger.com) and click on your Layout link for the blog that you want to add your stats to.

9) Now we click the Add Gadget link

10) Now click the HTML/Javascript Gadget

11) Now Paste the Statcounter code into the box as shown below and press Save

Voila you now have a Statcounter on your blog.

Now when you go back to your Statcounter Dashboard you should see your nice new Statcounter Project.

Clicking on the Project name then takes you into the detailed stats reporting for your project.

From here you can click on the Stats Details on the left hand side to explore your sites statistics in more detail.

I hope you have found this useful and if you have any questions feel free to drop me a note in the comments.