In my post 9 Things Every Blogger Should Understand, I mentioned that it’s important to have a stats package and to use it. I use Mint, but there’s other options out there as well. Why should you spend time with a stats package? To understand where your traffic comes from, and what they care about. If you use AdSense, you owe it to yourself to use the channels feature and track your clicks. Here are nine things I’ve learned, some of which likely apply to most any blog:
- Actively participating in online forums related to your niche, and including your blog URL in your signature, will result in a lot of traffic.
- My AdSense click-throughs are definitely higher when I write about narrower, more niche topics, than when I write about more general technology or political themes.
- Original content will always be more popular than links.
- I’ve had one story that was both on Digg and Slashdot’s home pages. In my case, Slashdot generated twice the traffic of Digg, although the Digg traffic was enough to crash the server before my host moved me to a new box.
- Celebrities have fans, and tapping into an intelligent, meaningful celebrity story will likely gather lots of links from fan sites and fan forums. This has worked for me with both Weird Al and Zach Braff posts.
- Allow dissenting comments.
- Link between your posts and blogs. You’ll find that you drive a lot of traffic amongst yourself.
- Use Technorati Tags. Tags are your friends and will bring you relevant, on-topic traffic (assuming you have used accurate tags).
- On my various blogs (which have varying levels of total traffic), things are consistent at the moment in that about 2/3 of my traffic is on the web, and 1/3 is from RSS aggregators.
Stats are your friend. Embrace them and learn.
