I’ve been watching my blogs web statistics lately. If you have a blog, I highly recommend doing that as well. Some things I’ve noticed…
1. This blog’s audience has grown every month since I started posting regularly in January.
2. There are a few topics my readers aren’t too interested in. I can tell, because when I post about them, my traffic stays about the same as if I hadn’t posted at all. If I didn’t know this, I could post this blog into the ground. But checking my stats lets me know to move on to something else, or… else!
3. My stats can tell me what keywords were used to find my blog in the search engines. This has helped me to discover which keywords I already rank well for, and which keywords I’m close to ranking well for. Some strategic posts can solidify my search engine ranking for those terms, and I get even more traffic.
4. Being ranked well for some keywords don’t help at all. For example, the keywords “Internet Advertising Copywriter” hasn’t gotten me a single hit, despite my ranking.
5. I’ve still got a lot of work to do
Most likely, your webhost has some sort of web statistics installed on your server already. Recently, my hosts stats program have become less reliable (along with a ton of other problems over the last 6 months). So I’ve started using www.statcounter.com. It’s free up to a point, but you need to upgrade if you’re getting more than 500 visitors. I’m going to see what the stats look like with the 500 visitors before I make my final decision.