In March this year I posted about a service called MyBlogLog (affiliate link) – an online service that tracks where people go when they leave your blog by looking at the outbound links that they click.
I originally used their free service which tracks just the most popular outbound clicks each day but have more recently upgraded to the full Pro service ($25 per year) which tracks outbound links in real time.and gives a longer list than just your top ten outbound links for the day.
Whether you go for the free or Pro version this is a very useful service that could really change the way you blog.
At first I just found knowing where people go when they leave my site interesting but didn’t do much with the information – but then I started to take a more strategic look at the information MyBlogLog supplies and realized that it had very useful applications.
For instance I found quite quickly on one of my blogs that many people were leaving my site to a dead link (not good). I also discovered that the most clicked upon links on my blog were in a certain position on my blog and changed my layout to maximize the return of this position.
I also discovered a couple of other site that I was sending significant amount of traffic to without knowing it. I was able to deepen my relationship with these sites as a result.
It was also useful to track the performance of some of my text links with advertisers and report back to them that their ads were doing well (or not) in relation to other text ads. We tweaked a few ads and found wording that performed better.
All in all the $25 outlay was well worth it for me and I’d recommend the service as being very useful (even the free one – especially for lower traffic sites). I have heard of other outbound link trackers that are free but haven’t tried anything else that is this easy to use.
My only real continued wish with MyBlogLog is that they’d be able to track Google Adsense links as well as other links and that they’d somehow track which pages on my blogs (I have thousands of pages) the links are coming from.
I hope the recommendation is helpful for readers.
