Slowly and insidiously, we begin to spend more time hard at work blogging, sometimes working well into the night to finish our daily posts and implement our backlinking strategies and linkwheels.

It’s not long before the success of our blogs become our main obsession and we eat, sleep and breathe our online business. The desire to make money online keeps us afloat above the stress and anxiety, but once worry and doubt  appear in our online lives it can be very hard to stop this kind of thinking. We start to worry about whether or not we’ve chosen the right affiliate products and networks, we worry about our customer satisfaction if we market directly to them, we worry about how much we are spending on ppc campaigns and how they are performing, and the biggest worry is whether we will get paid and of course when. We also have something in the back of our blogging minds that makes us wonder whether we are doing the most we can with this idea of doing business online. It’s easy to start wondering if everything we are doing is proper procedure or if we are breaking any advertiser rules.

What he have done essentially is unknowingly developed the paranoia of small business owners and we expect something terrible to happen to us while we wait for success online. Anyone going through these thoughts and worries needs to take a step back and relax a little. Starting a blog can be fraught with problems and situations that you were not prepared for but anything that comes up can be worked out in the end. Changing the way you look at things and keeping a positive attitude can keep you steadily blogging amid the stress and feelings of failure. Why? Because every online failure or problem is nothing more than a lesson learned. Many new bloggers put so much pressure on themselves to do everything perfectly that they give it up in disgust because it was just to hard on them physically and emotionally. It doesn’t have to be that way though, if you take the time to put everything to do with your online business into perspective. Life truly is what you make it and so is your online life. So what if you didn’t know you needed backlinks to find online success? Now you do. So what if you aren’t able to post every single day? Post when you can, there is no law that says you have to do otherwise. The bottom line is, don’t be so hard on yourself as a new blogger this is a learning process and you will get there in your own time and preferably stress free.

As a new blogger, you may be wondering to yourself about just how much traffic you blog gets and why. It’s important for any blogger who wants to be commercially successful to take a look at their web stats and measure their performance once in a while. If you’ve never even heard of web stats or how to measure them, then you do have your work cut out for you but hopefully this post will help get you through the worst of it. Every time you as a blogger publish a post, it affects who comes to your blog and the reasons why. Certain post keywords and tags have the ability to draw in readers like a magnet while others don’t do anything to improve your blog’s performance at all.

So how do you know which keywords and phrases are drawing your readers in to your blog? That’s where analyzing your website statistics comes in. It may not be the most enjoyable task you will have as a blogger, but it will show you exactly what people are searching for online before they end up at your blog. Analyzing your web stats can show you:

• Who has been to your blog in the past?
• Which pages and posts drew them to your blog specifically?
• Which of your backlinks are sending you traffic?
• Which sites have linked to your blog?
• What sort of traffic are these sites sending to you?
• What kinds of keywords are being used to find your posts?
• What type of browser your visitors use to view your blog?

There are plenty of other statistics that you can learn about your site’s traffic if you have good tracking software installed. Here is a list of some of the best hosted statistics software online today:

Google Analytics – This is a free online stats system hosted by Google that has many options for customizing and viewing your blog’s stats. It even allows webmasters to set traffic goals and obtain keyword search information.

Stat Counter – A free statistics tracker that even allows you to view maps of where in the world your traffic is originating from.

Site Meter – They offer free basic stats tracking, as well as very sophisticated advanced tracking through paid subscription.

What the heck are dofollow links anyways? Basically, you can leave a link at any site you like on the Internet, but some webmasters choose to use “nofollow” link structures on their pages. This means that they would like to keep the search engines on their site only, not let the search engines pass to your blog through the link you have posted on their site. A website that uses “dofollow” link structure allows the links you post on their sites to be found by Google and the other search engines every time these search engines come around to their sites. So think of sites that have ton of constantly  updated content and you will start to see how easily you can find places to put links to your blog on their site. Here is a list of the best sites that offer dofollow backlinks to your blog:

Squidoo – Create a page on Squidoo about your blog topic or something you’re interested in, and link to your blog from within the page
Ezine Articles – Write an article for Ezine Articles in the topic of your choice and add a link to your blog in your signature box
Go Articles – Same as Ezine Articles
Propeller – Submit a blog post to propeller and it automatically links to your blog
Slashdot – Same as Propeller

Other things you can do to get backlinks to your blog that will be seen by lots of Internet searchers even if they aren’t dofollow, is to Tweet your posts on Twitter as that will go around the Twitter universe and bring you some traffic. You could also leave a comment on a blog you find matches the interest of your blog and that will send traffic to your blog as well. Agree to trade links with other bloggers you like but be wary of link farms or placing your link on sites that are irrelevant to your site’s topics.

Most if not all of these dofollow websites expect you to earn your backlink by adding valuable and original content to their sites. So simply pasting your blog’s url all over the place without contributing content will put you in the doghouse with most of these sites and could get you banned for being a spammer.