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This is part of the the book BLOGTASTIC! Growing and Making a Difference Through Blogging. You can read the table of contents and follow the book on this page:
See the table of contents for the book here: BLOGTASTIC project
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BLOGTASTIC!: Blogging stats can be addictive.
Blogging can be addictive. Checking blogging stats can be addictive too.
Imagine you’re fascinated with a video game. It might be the newest game, or it might be a classic like Pac Man. At first, it is hard to clear the first level. You invest time mastering the game’s controls and the techniques you need. Eventually, you gain mastery and move forward. You might be rewarded with a cut-scene that reveals more of the story. This process continues until you face the final challenge and win the whole game.
Pac Man, released in 1980, offers 256 levels of fruit gobbling and ghost chases. It took nearly twenty years before anyone achieved what the gaming community agrees is the maximum possible score of 3,333,360 points. This required six hours of perfect game-play without losing a single life on the first 255 boards.
There’s a famous glitch in Pac Man. On level 256, the entire right-hand side of the screen displays garbled graphics with invisible walls and pathways. If you could somehow clear level 256, the game would loop back to level 1 (with greater challenges). Yet, the glitch makes it impossible to clear this final level. There is no way to win the original Pac Man arcade game.
Blogging offers no clearly defined final level. You can blog for years. You can be fascinated by the growth (or non-growth) of the traffic on your blog. Some people might say that they aren’t concerned about numbers, but almost everyone is concerned about results.
Analyzing your blog traffic will help you understand your readers and allow you to move more quickly towards the results you want to achieve. There reasons to be fascinated about blog traffic. Here are just a few of the details you can learn:
• Where do the visitors come from?
• What posts they are reading?
• Where they click through?
• Which posts get linked most?
• Which posts get the most comments?
• Which search terms do people use to find your blog?
Many people experience surprise when they see their blog’s statistics. There is no way to predict the answers to the above questions. You can be pleasantly surprised or disappointed. Nothing is certain. The only way to find out is to keep watching the traffic.
A smart blogger keeps an eye on their blog’s analytics and then learns from the lessons their readers provide them. For example, if you blog on three topics and learn that one topic receives the most links and comments, then your readers are telling you “give us more of this first topic and less of the others.”
Blogging Tip: Get organized to measure what matters
Playing ball without keeping score can be boring. Whether it’s your blog or your life, you have to measure what matters most. Only then do you get the feedback to make the necessary changes
Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. He maintains another blog called Life Beyond Code and tweets as @UpbeatNow