Use Your Site Stats To Write A Better Blog

Build A Better Blog Day 21

Today's tip is to use your blogs stats to help you decide whats popular with your readers, and write more about that. It's a proven fact people will use a search engine to find your blog more than any other way. Your blog stats can tell you exactly what words they are using to find you and what blog posts they are landing on.

Over a year ago I wrote a blog post on removing sharpie ink from a white board. Its a very common problem in offices everywhere. I had inherited a white board that had a considerable amount of permanent ink drawn all over the surface making it difficult to see any new writing. I grabbed my keyboard and typed in "remove sharpie ink from white board". Straight forward question and I knew Google would show me the site I needed. And sure enough it did. At the time, the number one site had an article that told me exactly what to do.

Once I had followed all the instructions and cleaned the board, I just had to share this with others. So I blogged about it here. And to this day, the words "sharpie" "remove" and "white board" drive more users to my site than any other. I am shocked because its the only time I've ever written about the subject and I consider it to be way off topic for my blog. So what can you do to take advantage of this phenomenon?

Right after I noticed the increased traffic to my blog I installed a Wordpress plug-in called Short Stats. This very simple blog statistics program showed me a lot about who was visiting my site, what they were looking for and looking at. A few months later I installed Google Analytics which gave me an even better view into what was happening with my site.

Some of the things I noticed was traffic for words like T-Mobile, MDA, Mobile, Windows, and posts with images. Many of my posts mention these key words and I try and link to some other blog post or web site to improve the link tree and help Google index my blog better. But most importantly I started writing more about the topics people visited my blog to read. They aren't the only things I write about, but I try and stay with the general theme.

Here are some key points:

1. Install some type of statistics or analysis software for your blog. If you host your own you can use your web hosts built in stats or try using a plug-in like Short Stats.


2. Check you stats often. I'm anal about it and check several times a day. I'll see a spike in traffic and want to know why and decide if I can capitalize on the spike.


3. Change what you are blogging about if you notice a trend. I'm not saying you should only blog about whats most popular but I would try and keep your posts along those same lines. You may find out you want to go straight up with a niche and move your other posts to a personal blog site. Many people do this.


4. Make sure you have a good search system on your blog. Whether you use the built in search or something like Google Search, it's extremely important to provide some type of search mechanism. I always make sure my search box is above the fold and on every page.


5. Try different topics. If you're not getting the traffic you want look at changing what you blog about. And make sure your blog is syndicated using RSS.

There are plenty of free stat services like StatCounter and Free Stats. These require you add some type of code to your pages. If you aren't well versed in PHP or HTML this may be a little more than you bargained for. The simplest stats program comes from your web hosting provider and can usually be accessed from an Administrator panel.

Tell me what stat software you use, what you have found interesting and what you have done with the information.

ProBlogger's day twenty one post: Make a Reader Famous