Blog Tips

I wrote before on how to use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog. I also published a short case study about the influence Twitter-generated traffic had onto my blogs.

Most of the evidence of Twitter-to-Blog traffic was circumstantial though: Google Analytics only tracks referral site traffic. As More and more people use a desktop or mobile applications, most of the visits from people clicking on Twitter-ed links are registered as “direct traffic”, and not originating from Twitter. Quid?

Now the mystery is solved, thanks to bit.ly, the URL shortener I use for all my Tweets. Bit.ly always tracked the clicks per link. Via their website you could track exactly that: the clicks per link, which looked like this:

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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 PageRank (PR) is one of the main ways to check a website’s “ranking” amongst its peers. Am I talking Chinese here? “PageRank” is Google’s rating (between PR0 and PR10 on an logarythmic scale) of ‘how valuable’ your site is to the web community (and hereby I shamelessly summarize 234,000 books and 1,234,000 articles written on the subject).

The higher a PageRank, the better, and the higher up your site will feature on a Google search. (and hereby I shamelessly summarize 34,000 books and 2,234,000 articles written on THAT subject)…

While weeding through 200 nonprofit blogs this weekend, I turved the PageRank of each:

Pagerank distribution of the nonprofit blogs

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I posted before about how to use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog, and illustrated the principle with a simple case study.

TechCrunch, a hugely popular resource for us webgeeks, just published interesting statistics about the impact of their Tweets onto their main website traffic.

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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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