If the purpose of your blog is to make money, knowing who is reading your blog is one of your most important responsibilities. You can’t make money unless people are reading your blog, and you won’t be able to effectively market your blog to its target audience. Therefore, it’s important to know everything you can about your readers.

In part one of our series, we’ll take a look at Mint, a piece of software designed to tell you everything you want to know about your visitors. Mint is actually designed to provide web site analytics, but is so well designed that it is excellently suited to telling you about your blog as well.

The heart of Mint is the dashboard, which provides information about every aspect of your site. Mint is made up of “Peppers,” or little plugins that portray information in a particular way. Each Pepper appears in its own box on the Dashboard, and the Dashboard can contain as many Peppers as you want to install. Mint by itself won’t actually give you any statistical information, but the default Peppers that it comes with are more than enough to get an inside look at your visitors. If you want an even deeper look, there are many more custom Peppers available on the Mint Peppermill.

First of all, the default Pepper “Visits” is possibly the most important Pepper you’ll have. It gives a breakdown of the total amount of visitors to your site. The five tabs across the top allow you to view a graph of the information over the past day, week, month, or year, and you can always check the Overview tab for the straight numbers all in one place.

The Visits Pepper makes a point to clearly separate your total visitor count from your unique visitor count, too, so you’ll be able to see at a glance exactly how many people are actually checking out your blog at any given time. For example, this past Wednesday, Blogging Addiction had 22 unique visitors, but nearly twice as many visits total (you were one of them, weren’t you?).

The other default Peppers, while not quite as visual, are just as useful. The Pages Pepper will tell you everything you want to know about your site’s individual pages. You can see at a glance an ordered list of your all-time most popular pages (our home page is our most popular page, with 748 hits, while “Why the Blogosphere is Like the Music Industry” is second with 108). You can also see a real-time list of the most recent hits. I can see that 17 minutes ago, for example, someone coming from johncow.com clicked a link to our Weekly Fix #5. You can even get a list of your most popular entry pages.

The other two Peppers focus on telling you where your visitors are coming from, rather than what they’re doing once they’re here. The Referrers Pepper will list every outside website that sends a visitor your way. It also gives you a tab to see which sites are sending you the most traffic. Mint tells me that we get a large chunk of ours from StumbleUpon. This Pepper can be particularly useful for advertising campaigns, telling you which ads are working and which aren’t; then you can focus your efforts on only the useful ads, bringing you more traffic.

The fourth and final default Pepper is Searches, which tells you what keywords people are getting to your site with, and gives you a link to the search page itself. I’ve just discovered that a Google search for “set a blog apart” lists my post on branding as the number one result (that will give any blogger a good feeling). It’ll also tell you where they’re going, so you can see if your keyword-targeted posts are actually bringing in traffic, and then see how much.

Mint is a fantastic package for any blog. So much, in fact, that we use Mint as our primary statistics package for Blogging Addiction. Like anything, though, there are a couple of downsides. First, you must be able to install the software on your own server. If you’re using a hosted solution like WordPress.com or Blogger, you’re out of luck. Also, Mint is relatively expensive, at $30. No matter how good it is, $30 is still $30.

Overall, though, we feel that Mint is easily worth the price. If you are capable of running Mint, you should definitely pay the price to try it out at www.haveamint.com. Between its variety of additional, free Peppers and the fantastic, clear dashboard, Mint is one of the best ways to watch your visitors.

For the next part in our series, we’ll take a look at Google Analytics, Google’s free tool to watch the virtual door of your website.

What do you think? What do you use to keep track of your blog’s readers? Make yourself known in the comments.

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