Link tracking

I've written before about my belief that bloggers are taking news out of the hands of newspapers. I'm talking about real bloggers, now, not just link hounds, but people who report on the situation in their own cities and towns.

Because of this, the companies providing services to bloggers are exploding. Bingr.com, which is completely free, is among the coolest of these. This site combines TinyURL-type functionality with Count Trakkula-like link tracking. In brief, you can create concise links to complex pages and then count the outgoing clicks that you recieve. For example, I created this link to Amazon:

Amazon

If you click on it, I'll know. Go ahead, I dare you. The traffic report generated is also quite impressive, showing, for example, the country where the click originated. This will be useful to me for optimizing my revenue from affiliate programs, which often require country-specific links.

The potential of this service is impressive. This service will allow you to measure where your readers are going and what they are interested in. Posting 50 stories a day about web services and 6 about politics? Maybe you'll find out that your readers are a political bunch, and increase that coverage.

The same goes for links to revenue-generating sites, including affiliate programs. Bingr.com gives you a central location for collection information about all traffic out of your site. Inbound traffic information is widely available, and important. Until now, outbound traffic information has been much harder to collect and analyze. If you are serious about your blog, I urge you to check it out.



Link: Bingr.com