Do you check your Blogs stats several times a week? Do you know what your looking for? If your like most you are looking to see how many people are checking out your blog. It seems to be the most important thing for everyone. In a way it is the most important thing but your stats can be so much more useful to you if used properly.
I use several different sources to gather the information needed to improve my blog. Here are a few things that you can do to help give yourself a boost in traffic by analyzing your traffic.
Use Feedburner and burn your feed
I use feedburner to publish my RSS Feed. This allows me to monitor number of subscribers so I can see what was happening during an increase or decrease in subscriptions.
Google Analytics as one method of keep track of traffic and demographics
Google analytics is pretty and it keeps stats all together to help me get a good graphical representation.
AWSTATS
This one is my favorite stats analyzer at the moment. It gives me a ton of information and I can correlate this data together with Feedburner and Google Analytics to see what is working on the site and whats not.
A few others worth mentioning
Firestats - A WordPress plug-in that gives me a quick look at the traffic for the last 24 hours plus more but I just use it for quick look to see if anything significant is happening real time.
Technorati and MyBlogLog - Just check to see how many people are favoriting the site and what kind of authority the blog is getting.
So now that I have all this information what do I do with it? Well thats a good question. What I do is look for increases and decreases n traffic and subscribers, look to see what was current on the Blog during that time, where the traffic originated from and keep tweaking and repeating things that are the effect of an increase. This may sound like too uch work but in the end it will be worth it ten fold.