Who is Watching?

Now that you have been blogging a bit (hopefully), you may be wondering who is "watching" your blog. You have probably noticed that not everyone who follows your blog 'follows' your blog publicly. As a teacher, I always wondered if people ever read my newsletters. I often have the same thoughts with my blogs, but there is a way to check... Read on!

Readers of your blogs can get sign up to get your blog emailed to them every time you add a new post. This is one of the easiest things I can show you how to do and it will literally take less than five minutes- even for those of you who are very uncomfortable still with blogging. You can add a gadget that is very simple to add. Just go to your design page and click add a gadget.
The first gadget that comes up when I do that is the one pictured above. It may not be the first gadget that comes up on your list. If it is not, scroll down. You will find it (and perhaps other fun gadgets you may want to use). To add this gadget just click the blue and white plus sign.
When you do that you will see a box like the one pictured above. You can change the title if you'd like to "Sign up to get this blog via email" or something of that nature, or you can leave it as is. Let others know that they can sign up to follow your blog via email (and let them know that unsubscribing is easy to0- just a click). I would also recommend signing up yourself. This way you will know when the emails are sent out. They are not immediate, but should go out within 24 hours (which is nice if you reread your posts and realize you need to fix something- your edited version will go out). I am too tired at the moment to reread this post- so hopefully everything looks good (my apologies if I missed something).

You can always come back to this gadget on your design page and click "Edit" and then click "View stats and learn more". While you won't know WHO exactly is getting emails for your blog, you will know how many are signed up.
Similarly if you haven't noticed, you can go to the stats tab (listed above) and see how many hits your blog gets in a day, week, month etc. Recently a post I wrote on another blog got over 4000 hits in three days! With only 30 comments, I would have never guessed that so many had read it, but the stats page let me know, so check in with it and see who (or how many) is watching.

And- sign up to get this blog as an email for future updates.

Since many reading this blog are teachers, I would also recommend following each other's blogs. I've gotten some great ideas from what you are doing in your classrooms.

Happy Blogging-

L