Blog Tips

Sites linking back to your blog’s homepage or to a post, are a measure of success for a blog, as we explained before. It is always interesting to check the backlinks, to see what are others saying about your blog, what has been quoted or commented on.

As you know, you can find backlinks via the Google backlink checker, Google Blog search, and the webmaster utilities from Google, Yahoo and Bing. However these require you to check online regularly. And if you have a few hundred backlinks, it is difficult to pick out the most recent ones.

There is a way to get an automated Email notification when new backlinks become active, using Google Alerts. And it is for free. The only thing you need is a Gmail account, the log-in credentials Google uses for all its services.

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You created your blog, and write posts, write posts, write posts… Gradually, your audience grows. You get comments, get other bloggers linking to you,… Your blog has a lift-off. But how much of a lift-off? Are you flying in orbit, or are you barely clearing the tree tops? How do you measure your blog’s performance. How do you keep track of it?

Success is in the eye of the beholder

What means “success” to you? Are you writing for a selective public? Then reaching those handful would mean accomplishment for you. Are your goals accomplished having created a small working community around your project blog? Good for you. Or are you already happy just to have a medium where you can post stuff, and can refer to if you get questions about your organisation? Ride on!

But.. if you are a main stream blogger, you will need more than that. You will want more than just a handful of visitors per day. You will want more than one comment per week. What tools are around to keep track of how well you are doing?

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A serious blog is geared towards its audience. As a serious blogger, it is important you understand your audience, your readers.
When I started blogging, I struggled to understand my blog traffic. Simple and free tools like Google Analytics, gave me heaps of figures and graphs, but it took me a while before I could recognize trends, and really understand the meaning behind the figures.

I’d like to share this experiences using a practical case study. I hope it helps you understand some basic basic questions:

“Who reads my blog? Where does this visitor ‘traffic’ come from? How many posts do they typically read? How do I group this traffic so I can see trends, and how can I turn new visitors into returning visitors?”

Analysing your traffic will help you writing posts in function of your audience. It helps you target your content’s promotion. Optimizing your time spent on non-core activities like social bookmarking sites, blog catalogs or forums, will free up time for what a serious blogger should do: write good content.

In the series “Understanding the traffic on your blog”, I will go through the different steps, using The Road to the Horizon – my personal blog – as a practical case study, so you see how easy an analysis is.

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In Part 1 of this series we concentrated on the quantity of your blog visitors. We used a case study based on the 300,000 visitors on The Road to the Horizon, my personal non-profit blog.

In Part 2, we will focus on the quality of your traffic: Based on the 7 main groups of traffic generators (Search engines, Social bookmarking sites, Direct traffic, Discussion forums, Blog catalogs, Social Media and other websites/blogs), what is the most valuable traffic? And where should we allocate more time on?

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Using an actual blog as a case study, we looked at the quantity of the traffic in Part 1 of this series. In Part 2, we zoomed in on the quality of the traffic.
In this post, we will summarize our conclusions and practical tips.

The bottom line

A blog, just like any website, has two main types of visitors:

• The new visitors
• The returning visitors

New visitors stumble upon your blog by coincidence. They are first time visitors, mostly as a freebie from social bookmarking sites and search engines.
These are the people browsing in a bookstore. They took out one of your books, look at the front and the back, and flip through some pages. If they are not interested, they will put your book back onto the shelf.

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