Posts tagged Google Analytics
Blogging: Measuring Success
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Are you thinking of starting a blog? Are you already blogging, wondering how it will benefit your writing career? The reason most writers blog is to showcase their writing and make themselves known to potential readers—who eventually will buy their work.
How can you know whether your blog is accomplishing what you want it to? How do you measure success? First, you must come up with your own definition of success for your blog. Decide on your reason for blogging. Then devise a way to measure your progress.
- Making money: This one is easy. If you’re not making money, you’re not succeeding. However, sometimes it takes a while to build clientele. Expect income to start small and increase over time.
- Traffic: If you’re blogging to find readers, you need to know how many you have. Visitors are those who land on your blog and read it at random. Subscribers are regular readers who sign up to get your material regularly. You can track those subscribers by using a service like Feedburner. See my previous post on Feedburner here. Then, read my previous post about how I follow traffic stats with Google Analytics.
- Participation: You can have traffic and subscribers, but you don’t know whether anyone is reading your material unless your visitors comment on your posts or participate in your surveys. One way to increase comments on your blog is to find other writers’ blogs and comment on theirs. They’ll be willing to help you if you help them.
So—don’t be discouraged. Create your blog, and decide what you want from it. You are the CEO of your blog, so you get to set the goals and define success.
More Information:
Announcement: The winner of drawing for Max Lucado’s Cast of Characters has not responded to my e-mail. If your e-mail address begins with “kbruins,” please e-mail me at akinemily@gmail.com and provide your name and mailing address so that I can send you your book.
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Next week’s post will be a guest article by writer, speaker, and workshop leader, Tracy Crump. She’ll share her adventures setting up her own website using Homestead.
Announcement: The winner of drawing for Max Lucado’s Cast of Characters has not responded to my e-mail. If your e-mail address begins with “kbruins,” please e-mail me at akinemily@gmail.com and provide your name and mailing address so that I can send you your book.
Measuring Success: Google Analytics
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How do you know whether anybody is reading your blog? Why spend all the time and energy it takes to produce content if there are no readers? This question came up in an online writers’ group recently. You may be wondering that too, so, in this post, I’ll share the method I’m using now.
When I was using the free WordPress blogs (www.wordpress.com), I had access to limited traffic statistics on the main dashboard. Now that I’m using self-hosted WordPress (www.wordpress.org), I decided to check out Google Analytics. You can use your existing Google login information if you are already a Google user.
I set up my account on February 5, 2010. I can now see traffic trends from that date to the current date, or I can check traffic for a specific month, week, or day. Right now, I don’t have many e-mail subscribers. If I only used that number to measure my following, I might get discouraged in a hurry. However, when I post new material, I announce it on Twitter and Facebook. A few days later, I go to Google Analytics and examine the traffic. Most of the time, I get a bump in visitors during the 24-hour period following the Twitter/Facebook post. (more…)
