Blogging Tips

Vikas recently warned against becoming obsessed with blog stats. He noted that bloggers could become tense and could compromise on quality because of this obsession. While he makes some good points there is another way of thinking about it. I suggest that if you are a serious blogger you need to keep an eye on your blog stats because what you learn will help you improve your blog. I check my blog stats regularly but it’s not an obsession — it’s a way of helping me to check my content and see what works and what doesn’t. Here’s what I look at:

Content

First of all, there’s the content that attracts people — there are two key things to be aware of here. One, looking at the content will tell you what titles draw in your readers. On my blog they tend to be titles with numbers in them or how to articles. Delving deeper, I can see which particular topics they have found most interesting. That tells me not only which  posts I should cover in more detail but what topics might be useful for creating information products.

Searches

Statistics on searches are also very useful. Monitoring this metric  shows whether you are being found by the keywords that best describe what you do or what your blog is about. On my writing blog I want people to find me using terms related to writing while on the travel blog I run I’m more interested in travel related terms.

How Did You Find Me?

I am also interested in how people are finding me. I use Clicky to monitor my stats (as well as Google Analytics), making it easy to see how many people have found me through searches, how many have bookmarked my site, how many have followed links and how many are accessing my site through social media mentions an RSS readers. It’s a good way to track whether your social promotion efforts are working.

Building Community

Delving even deeper, looking at links shows me who is linking to me and gives me the chance to visit some new blogs, thank them and perhaps return the favour. In this case checking my stats is part of building a community around my blog. One of the things I like about Clicky — and it’s a feature that is also present in Woopra — is the ability to see who’s on my site now. If a particular post is suddenly getting attention then it’s a good time to add a welcome message or edit the post to link to another related post you might want people to visit.

These are just a few of the ways in which checking your stats can be helpful and they are essential to keeping your blog running smoothly and effectively. I agree with Vikas that are becoming obsessed and checking stats several times a day is not worth your while; . However checking every couple of days or setting up an e-mail report so the information comes to you will help you build a better blog.