Fairy Blog Mother
The good thing about WordPress.com is that there are a lot of applications already added which you don’t need to worry about – one of which is statistics of how many people have looked at your blog posts.
If you have a WordPress.org blog, you can add all sorts of fancy plugins to monitor your visitors’ statistics, such as Google Analytics, but as this is not possible for a WordPress.com blog there is a perfectly adequate statistics alternative provided – which I find easier to understand, and much more accessible.
And another thing to note, these stats are updated progressively, so you can track your performance throughout the day, whereas with Google Analytics only the results from the previous day are viewable. For WordPress.org users, there is a plugin that copies these kinds of stats, but I am unable to use it on this blog as for some reason it fails to work for me.
You can find it in the left sidebar in Dashboard and by clicking on ‘Site Stats’:
And when you click on it you’ll visit the Stats page:
This is such an exciting page, even if you aren’t familiar with statistics. Every time you get a higher block, there is such an overwhelming sense of achievement, and comparing them with past days to see the overall trend can result in a kind of competitiveness.
Timeline
The stats are spread over a month if viewed via days, and you can alter how you look at these stats by changing them to weeks and months with the tabs in the top left corner of the graph.
This shows a spread-out version of how your posts are performing, and hopefully they will show a steady increase in traffic as your blog get older and you become more adept at writing posts.
Another thing to note are how the peaks and troughs conform to the times when you are posting. For example, if you don’t post at the weekends, there is more likely to be a dip at that point, and if you have written a post that appeals to a large number of people, or has triggered a response from the search engines, there will be a peak.
Below this are more details of your statistics:
And this is where you can have a field-day if you are into this sort of thing. On the right just below the graph you can see which top posts and pages have been viewed:
And by clicking on ‘Yesterday’ you can compare the previous day’s stats as well. Each one of these headlines is a link (you can tell because it is blue), which will take you to the post in question, so you can read the content and see why it has been so successful.
To the left of these are the referrers, places elsewhere on the web which have a link to your blog, and this shows the where the visitor came from. Some of them may seem incomprehensible, as that is due to search engine criteria, but you will recognise many of them, such as your website or social networking sites like Twitter.
Below this are stats which show which key-phrases were typed into the search engines, which were matched up with posts from your blog. This can be quite interesting, as it is good to compare whether they match your post’s headlines, or whether other words were used to find your blog. It is also a good way of finding out what’s popular in search criteria at the time, which you could monopolise by writing another post with that subject matter to see if you can capture the next search wave.
This is just a quick summary of how to use these free statistics provide by WordPress.com. If you are mathematically-minded you could happily spend time interpreting the different figures and forming strategies and campaigns to monitor your progress and improvement. Alternatively you could just watch the peaks and troughs go up and down, and aim to maintain a constant level or a steady rise.
And whatever you do, don’t forget it should be fun!
Results of my blogging experiment so far
The most amount of views in one day has been 12 so far, and since the third day I have always had traffic (I’m up to 70 views so far). I’m not sure about the reliability of WordPress’s statistics, as when I have received email notifications about ‘likes’ from readers, these have not been picked up. Therefore I suggest you treat these results with a pinch of salt, and don’t take them as ‘gospel’.
One of the main indicators of a successful blog is the amount of interaction you receive, whether it’s in the form of comments or ‘likes’. Even though the latter is gratifying, the former is the most desired (so far I’ve got two), as it shows you have moved the reader enough to express themselves in words rather than just pressing a button.
I have set up the sharing buttons to allow readers to share my posts, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this yet. But it is early days… However, the RSS system is set up to syndicate or feed my posts onto Twitter and Facebook, and the stats do show if anybody does click through from these to view my posts.
Frequency is certainly a good indicator to get regular traffic, but so is good content. Visitors need to know that whenever they visit they will get something worthwhile to read, as well as something new each time. Pictures make blog posts more interesting, and can say a lot more than words, so you can create a satisfactory post quite quickly and easily. I will be investigating how to make this process more efficient using various technological advances that are becoming available – watch this space.
Another thing to mention is that I take as much care with my categories and tags as with the quality of content and pictures. Adequate keyword usage stimulates the search engines and helps new visitors to find you. And it’s important to include the alt tags behind your images too, not only for the spiders to read, but to help any partially sighted visitors to understand your blog better.
If you want to take a look at the blog in question, feel free: http://aspiringcountrywoman.wordpress.com