Traffic statistics are one of the best measurement systems available to the blogger. This gives almost immediate feedback to how each posting is being received by your readers. Almost any of the traffic statistics packages out there will give you the basic information you need to build your readership.

Traffic statistics measure if your blog titles are drawing in traffic, if your content is interesting and if the comments you are making on other blogs is referring traffic to your site. Don’t obsess over your site statistics but use them as a tool to find out what your visitors find interesting.

1. Overall Trend – Is there a steady increase in traffic coming to your blog. I watch the total number of visits, the number of unique visitors and the volume of visits each day. If you take your monthly totals and divide the total visits by the unique visitors, you will get the number of times the average visitor came back to your blog.
2. Most Popular – Which postings are attracting the most traffic? I will look at this two ways. I look at the daily traffic and see which days had a spike in traffic. I then look at which articles appeared that day and try and figure out what I said that was most interesting and I will try and do this again. I will also look which postings are listed as entry pages. These are usually the ones being found in searches.
3. Referral Traffic – Which sites are sending you visitors? Visit the site and investigate if it is a link from a website, a blog posting or perhaps a link in a comment that you have left. Commenting gets the attention of the bloggers that you focus on
4. Referring Search Engines – Which search engines are referring visitors to you? You are probably ranked well for one or more search terms on this engine. If it’s a keyword you want others to find through search engines, write a blog post with that keyword in the headline.
5. Keywords – Which keyword phrases are you being found for? Find the posting that is generating the traffic and see what you did? If this is a phrase you are targeting, see how you can do this again. It helps you to know how to optimize your blog for SEO even better and can give hints on what content to write more of.
6. Bounce Rate – Some Statistics packages such as Google Analytics show Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of people who leave your website without viewing any extra pages. Bounce rates under 50% are good, if it is greater than 75% then you need to make some changes.

Other things to watch include which postings are getting comments and what questions are being asked? These could make great future posts. Check Technorati inbound links - So that I can connect with or respond to someone who has just linked to my blog.

Write good, quality, interesting content, blog about the subject you’re most passionate about, post on a consistent schedule, invest in the blogging community by participating in other blogger’s posts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 4:26 am and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.