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2011Blogging Today For A Better Tomorrow Part 2
Today I present part 2 of my Blogging Today For A Better Tomorrow series. This is an educational series geared towards helping you make improvements to your blog today that will have an impact on its long term success. For those of you who missed it, you can click the link below for part 1.
Blogging Today For A Better Tomorrow Part 1.
In part one I briefly covered topics including SEO, establishing long term visitor retention as well as the importance of blog post consistency. For your benefit, today I’d like to tackle the topic of monitoring blog stats. I hope you find the points below to be useful and informative. Some of these blogging tips will help you get results faster but keep in mind this is directed more towards long term traffic and success for your blog.
Monitoring Your Blogs Traffic & Stats
Whether you’re a blogger or not it’s hard wired in most people’s brains to pay close attention to numbers. It seems practically everything revolves around numbers in one way or another either directly or indirectly. It’s common for a lot of bloggers to be stat junkies who constantly monitor numbers such as changes in traffic patterns, amount of followers, revenue totals and the list just goes on and on.
It’s important to pay attention to numbers, in fact it’s critical that you do so, but you must be careful when it comes to the frequency of doing this. It’s all about finding that proper balance and routine, which of course is not always easy to achieve at first, but it can be done. When you work online as a blogger it’s typical to feel eager about finding out if your sales and traffic are rising. Just be careful you don’t spend more time checking stats than you spend actually working on your blog.
Self discipline comes naturally to some while others need to practice hard at it. We check stats primarily to gauge where our site was, where it is and to get a rough idea where it’s going. If you do this too often though you could be crippling your blogs performance without even knowing it.
Top Reasons For Not Checking Your Stats Too Often
1) It Takes Time To Establish A Blog
We would all love instant or quicker results. The truth is though, blogs take time to become established. Things take however long they take and having a successful blog is no exception. Spending more time checking your traffic and revenue will not speed up the process, if anything it will slow it down.
2) You Risk Becoming Easily Discouraged
It’s very rare that a blogs traffic will instantly spike, and even if this does happen out of the blue it will most likely just be a short lived traffic surge. We’re talking long term here though. Checking your stats every hour and constantly seeing no improvement could potentially lead you to becoming very discouraged. This will have a very negative impact on your productivity as well as the success of, or shall I say lack of, your blog.
3) Sidetracks You From Producing Quality Content
If you’re the type who is constantly worried about blog traffic and revenue don’t sweat it, you’re not the only one. However, just think how much time you’ve wasted each time you check those numbers. Trust me, a few minutes here and a few minutes there, over and over, really do add up big time whether you realize it or not. This is time wasted that you’ll never be able to get back and time you could have spent improving the content on and optimization of your blog instead.
Solution
Try to schedule a specific window of time each month to gauge your blogs performance. Although this may not be an easy task, it can be done if you discipline yourself enough. You could even start at closer intervals such as once every week or two weeks and work your way up. Think of it this way, all of these Forbes top 100 companies that release Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 income reports, do you think they’d be even half as successful and wealthy as they are if they had to prepare these reports every hour or even every day? Heck, they’d never get any real work done. Just think about that analogy for a moment, really think about it and tell me if I’m wrong.
This information I’m sharing is not meant to make you feel bad, but sometimes the truth hurts. I would be doing you no justice by sugar coating the matter. The truth is, I’m trying to help you and believe me if you are driven enough things will improve the longer you blog. I have been guilty in the past of being obsessive compulsive when it comes to checking stats myself if it makes you feel any better. I’ve spent over 55,000 hours working online since 1998 and believe me, in my early years I had to learn the hard way about time management. Staring at revenue stats, how many Twitter or Facebook followers you have, or traffic numbers won’t magically make them change is all I’m saying. You have to work hard at your blog to make those numbers change.
Final Thoughts
I hope today’s information was of some value to you. Blogging is meant to be fun and rewarding, but it does require a certain amount of discipline in some areas. I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions, please feel free to speak your mind in the comments section below.
