minticon.pngMany feel that tracking your stats is the best way to see how you are progressing with your blogging. Whilst I semi-agree with this, I believe a blogs success is shown in how readers are getting involved in the comments, and your RSS subscriber count.

Stats are very important though. I love to see where visitors are coming from, where they are clicking, and what posts are the most popular. Mint is a product that helps you keep tab on your blogs stats. In my opinion, Mint is the premier stat tracking product on the market,not even Googles’ Analytics beats Mint.

Mint is the most beautiful and easy to use stat tracking product on the web. After you install it you add a little line of code onto your header document, and it will start tracking visits to your blog. Shaun, Mint’s developer has used a combination of images, CSS, JavaScript and AJAX to make it really shine.

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One of the smartest things Shaun did when building Mint was allowing developers to tap into Mint’s API to create plugins, called Peppers. Peppers can easily be installed into Mint to provide even more statistical tracking, check out the full list of Pepper’s for more info.

The graphical interface and the usability of Mint is very hard to explain, so in short, if you want to track stats for your blog, head over to the Mint site and drop $30 to get your copy. You will not regret it.

I hope you enjoyed the “Blogging 101″ series. By now you should have your plan worked out, installed WordPress, picked a theme, installed essential plug-ins, and installed Mint to track your stats. You are ready to start writing.

“Blogging 202″ will include tips on how to write great content for your blog and attract readers. It’s currently in the works, so look out for it in the upcoming months.