You do Analyze and Evaluate your Blog Regularly, don't You?

Every Monday I do a quick analysis of how my blogs are doing and try to establish a strategy for which changes need to be made in order to keep it as succesful as I possibly can. Of course I stick to the topics I ordinary write about, but I use the data collected from Google Analytics in order to perhaps put some extra focus on what seems to be most popular among my readers.

Let me illustrate this with a simple example:

You blog about apples and pears. You write ten posts, five about apples and five about pears (50% about each). When you use Analytic's "best content" tool you find that every post about apples has been visited 25 times, while the ones about pears have only had one or two visits. Should you then keep writing as much about pears as about apples?

Well that depends on the purpose of your blogging. If you write just for fun and don't care about traffic, by all means keep writing about those pears. Then you could even skip the posts about apples altogether.


If you want your blog to be popular, however, you must consider what your readers really want to read about. You must think of your blog as a business where you try to sell the product that is most popular at the moment (while at the same time offering those "pillar articles", quality content that will keep being valuable to your readers over a long period of time).

Of course you still have to enjoy writing your blog (why do it otherwise), but perhaps you could write 75% about apples and 25% about pears instead. Or focus on making your "pear articles" more interesting. But that might be a more demanding task than "switching focus".

To summarize I encourage you to use some kind of tool to analyze the general trend of your blog's popularity and also which subjects and posts that are most popular. I have so far only used the free Google Analytics and so far I have not needed anything else.

I suggest that you establish a routine (once a week, once a month, what you find suitable) and find answers to the following questions:

- How is my blog doing? Has it been getting more traffic or less lately?
- Any particular days when the traffic was remarkably good?
- Which were the most popular posts and topics? Did these posts contain something that other posts lack? What could that be?
- What do I think my readers want to read about? (A good way is to ask for their feedback. Socializing with your readers is not only enjoyable, it also keeps them returning for social reasons. Most people need attention. By being friendly, making sure to reply to comments you establish a positive atmosphere one that reader's want to come back to. But that's a topic of its own)

I do this by the start of each week, since I find this kind of analysis really interesting. I'm always curious about how my blog is doing and why. You must find what suits you, but if you're serious about improving the amount of traffic you must be aware of what attracts your readers.

Hope these suggestions were valuable to you. Do give feedback and let me know what you want me to write more about.

Happy blogging!