Friday, January 8, 2010

Networked Blogs




Townie wrote the other day about his traffic and among other things, how many of his followers read on Facebook Notes. These views don't register with Statcounter so you never really have an accurate log of your numbers. A while ago I started using an app called Networked Blogs to display posts on my FB home page. When you post something, it shows the title and a 'teaser' along with a thumbnail of your blog page. When people click on it to read the full article, they are redirected to your blog rather than a notes page. That way it registers as a page load. 

Setting it up is easy. Once you go through the registration steps they give you some code that you need to add, just like you do for any other gadget for your blog. (There are detailed instructions for Blogger installs as well as other blog formats.) I will admit that for some reason the set up didn't work for me right away and I ended up having to email them. They asked for my blog address and within a few hours it was on there and has worked great ever since.

Once you're set up, the program will pull from your URL every so often and it shows up on your FB page. The number of times it pulls depends on how many followers you have although it does it at least once a day for everyone. If you prefer you can always go in and pull manually any time you want. 

So, if you want to know how much traffic you really get this could work for you. I'm glad I added it. My numbers went up substantially which I assume means I had those readers all along. Now I just know about them.





1 comment:

rachel said...

I just added networked blogs on facebook, and also use statcounter. When I click on the link to my blog from facebook, the url shows networkedblogs.blah blah blah, rather than my blog url. kwim? I'm wondering if those "hits" will still count through statcounter. Do you have any idea? I'm usually more articulate than this...I'm just having a hard time explaining. ; )