5 ways to measure your popularity

Do you have a blog or are you considering creating one? Sooner or later you get curious about how popular your blog is.

I will present the 5 tools I use to measure my popularity:

1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics can tell you nearly everything about the traffic on your site.
Nice graphs and maps describes in detail what content on your blog that is popular, who visits your blog and when they do it.
It is a very easy way to measure your traffic and a "must have" if you don't use a similar tool already.
You need a google account to use this tool.


2. Feedburner
Blogs are often read from a rss/atom feed and your readers may not even hit your blog for google analytics to catch them.
Luckily Feedburner provides thorough statistics about how many readers you have of your feed.
Paste your rss/atom feed into feedburner and use the url they give you as your new feed url. This will give you the statistic information you need about your readers.


3. Google webmaster tools
Like analytics, webmaster tools is provided by google. This tool is focused around how you can optimize your site.
It provides comprehensive statistics about who links to your blog and what search queries has led to you.


4. Technorati
Technorati is a index based searchengine for user-generated content like weblogs. Besides having a place to add your blog they operate with a term called “Authority”.
Authority is represented as a number your blog gets based upon how many people are linking to you and how popular they are.
It is always fun to follow your authority and see it rise as your content gets popular and people adds a link to you.


5. Del.icio.us url checker
Many people uses delicious to bookmark content they find popular.
You can check how popular your blog is at del.icio.us here.




This is the tools I find useful. Let me know if I am missing some.