Statistics Are Robbing Your Blog.
Statistics are the thief of your blog’s success because you spend too much time analyzing and hoping and not enough time thinking and writing.
Your goals as a blogger are to produce an income stream that will rival the best in the business. You want 15,000 subscribers, A bounce rate under 20%, your return visit rate above 10 visits per person and the most important statistic; revenue to be enough to maintain a happy and fruitful lifestyle. But you are robbing your blog of that exact success by caring too much.
You spend 30 minutes a day at least checking awstats, google analytics, commission junction, kontera text ads, text-link-ads, google adsense and feedburner… just to see how the blog has performed that day. But what you didn’t realize was that you wouldn’t need to so closely monitor these stats if your blog was truly performing.
Yes statistics are beneficial and relevant, but you don’t need to see what your Alexa ranking is twice a day. Take your mind of off the stats and help your blog by giving those 30 minutes back to it.
If you would spend 30 minutes a day commenting on other blogs, researching and writing informational relevant articles, helping others in forums, or passing out business cards your statistics would be skyrocketing.
You are not bettering the performance of your blog by simply checking your statistics, you are in fact hindering it because you are not generating any new methods of increasing performance.
Here are 5 ways to treat your statistics right.
- Check Them Weekly.
- Set New Goals Every Time.
- Don’t Brag About Your Stats, Explain them
- Knowing What You Made Doesn’t Help, Knowing How you made it does.
- Spend More Time Writing
That’s right only once a week. Sit down and analyze what has happened over the past week, with a bigger selection of stats (A weeks worth, not a days) you will be able to better analyze the sites trends.
With your new information on hand you can set appropriate goals by isolating trends and working with them to create new traffic. Then at the end of the next week you can see what worked and what didn’t.
Gentlemen this goes for you. Blogging isn’t a pissing contest. Your readers are interested in your statistics, but they don’t need to now how great you are, they need to know how you became great. Explain to your readers how you found the best paths to success in your site and how you exploited them to create better returns on investments.
If you are new to blogging you probably haven’t realized that you won’t be making money right away. If you are an old blogger you still can’t understand why you got clicks yesterday and not today when you had more visitors. You can’t predict the habits of your users. Analyze your income methods, see which are performing best and compare them against your other strategies to increase your revenues, don’t just check to see if you made money today.
This is the easiest one. If you want to see an increase in your statistics spend more time working on your content. 10 minutes a day will give you view crap and they will eventually realize it. If you spend more time checking statistics that you do creating good content you soon won’t have any statistics to check.
I know this all sounds a little preachy, but it is a goal I have set for myself as I am one of you. I spend to much time worrying about the performance of my site and not enough time making it perform better. Your site won’t become a hit if you don’t know why it isn’t a hit.
If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed. If you like emails subscribe via email. Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me acheive my goal of 100 subscribers by June.
5 Comments
Adam on March 8th, 2008
Then hello my name is Adam and I have OSD. It is something I am trying to control, but have difficulty doing.
Damien Franco on March 9th, 2008
I can totally relate to Adam. I need help!
Damien Franco’s last blog post..Share your tips!
Sean Hodge on March 15th, 2008
Good advice. I think the analyzing where your traffic is coming from is very helpful. It lets you see what is working and how its working. And the goal setting is the most important. Checking traffic daily isn’t necessary as you mentioned.
Try to be specific with your goals. Saying I want 100 subscribers by June is a good goal, but also try I will write an article about ___instert subject___, and promote it on x, y, z blog or social media site and get 1000 visitors to that article. Try to figure out what will make a popular topic and how you’ll drive traffic to that post. This is strategy building.
Spending more time writing is good advice. Building flagship content is important. Once your doing that once a week though try writing some shorter quality posts. Getting more done in less time is helpful. I wrote a post today for AiBURN that took 2 hours to put together. Tutorials take more like 6-8. The tutorials are the big draw on the site, but some smaller interesting posts will give people that land on your site more to read.
Just some thoughts. Good luck. Great Post. Thanks.
Sean Hodge’s last blog post..Inspiration: Designbum
Adam on March 17th, 2008
@Sean Hodge
Sean, That is great advice. I definelty need to start defining more specific goals and analyzing my statistics in better. Right now I am still very much trying to break the habit of checking them so frequently.
ps. I love your tutorials on Aiburn.
Shycon Design on March 8th, 2008
Good stuff. A lot of people spend too much time focusing on their statistics and stuff, something we call “obsessive statistics disorder”, when you could spend much more time adding content!