Now you know the kind of things you need to be monitoring, let's take a look at some of the tools that can help you do this.
There are dozens of web analytics tools available. They have varying degrees of complexity and widely varying costs—some of the high-end solutions require expensive licenses. However, the good news for bloggers is that there are some great solutions that don't cost a penny. Here, we'll take a look at two: WordPress.com Stats and Google Analytics.
The hosted version of WordPress includes a great stats system. Many self-hosted WordPress users were green with envy when they saw what WordPress.com bloggers got to play with. So the WordPress.org community (specifically, Andy Skelton) came up with a plugin that makes WordPress.com Stats available to anyone with a self-hosted blog...