31 Days to a Better Blog—Day 11
Jun 9th, 2008 by Nut
Day 11 of Building a Better Blog is here. Today’s tip is one that is close to my heart because I’m a big fan of baseball stats. So Analyzing my Blog’s Stats means digging into the numbers to try to discover new things about the site and ways to make it better.
I’m a big fan of numbers and statistics when it comes to sports, but I’ve never really taken to poring over this site’s stats (except for Google Adsense, which yields very little). I’ve had Google Analytics from the start (several bloggers recommended it), but I haven’t used it a whole lot, so this exercise is a good one for me to take on.
First on the list are my most popular posts. And those would be the following:
- Build Your Own Mutual Fund (bit of analysis, number crunching)
- Ten Traits That Make You Rich (personal stuff)
- Saving Money vs Saving Time (personal and saving money and time)
- Freelance Writing: Setting Your Rate (personal)
- Getting a Joint Bank Account (personal)
Taking a quick look at the top five posts highlight some important points: most of them include a heavy dose of personal anecdote or involve some analysis on my part. In other words, I’m either talking about myself or I’m doing some work on behalf of the reader. And #3 doesn’t surprise me at all: if there are two things out there people are interested in it’s saving money and time. Interesting…and something I’ll keep in mind in the future. Even if I were to put up the top ten posts, it’s the same story down the line.
Another tip that Problogger discusses is about setting up relationships with those blogs that drive traffic to your own. Known as referral traffic, this makes sense because they obviously like your work enough to refer you and their readers are obviously seeing something they like in your work to come over. Turns out my top referrals are sites I already have relationships with, so that’s good to know. There is one that I was surprised to see in the stats, so I’ll make sure to cozy up to that person a little more.
Here’s a fun one — the top keywords that brought people to my site are:
- College
- Cardlab
- Investing Analogies
- Sports analogy
Which is interesting because it makes my “search-engine reader” sound like a college kid that loves sports and is interested in getting a credit card. Which isn’t what I would’ve guessed (and could be wrong). But that’s what makes this whole process so interesting! Anyway, I’ll make sure to keep a closer eye on these stats to make sure I pick up on any trends or things like that.
Until then, why not leave a comment telling me if you are a college student interested in sports/credit cards?
To read all of the posts of the 31 Days to a Better Blog series, click here.
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Should I know what Google Analytics is/are? Maybe you should blog about it, for people like me.
Good catch GG, maybe I will put something together for later this week. It’s basically just a tool that shows you any and all stats you can think of related to the traffic on your blog. You drop some code into your site and it you access it from Google Analytics page. It’s straightforward and probably has more info than I know what to do with.
Cool. I Googled it after commenting here and sort of figured it out… I totally didn’t know about it before, so thanks!