Do Your Visitors Like Your Blog Content? How To Tell
If you're running a blogsite and have built it up with a fair bit of traffic, you may be finding some extreme fluctation in page views over time. While some fluctuation is normal in a fairly visible website/blogsite, extremes may be pointing to deeper issues. The first question to ask yourself is: Do my posts generally stick to one tight topic area? If they don't, this might be the reason for the decreases.
For example, I run four cooking blogs (at the time of this writing). One of them has been running longer, which might account for the greater number of readers. But the more popular one also appears to have the most fluctuation. When I run more personal stories about my experiences as a cook, I have less page views. When I run recipes, I have a greater response. Similarly, on another cooking blog, I talk about keeping your food budget down. When I write posts about growing your own veggies or buying time-saving kitchen gadgets, I get a lower response than just plain recipes. But if I combine info about gardening with a recipe into the same post, I get a better response altogether.
To determine if your readers similarly appear to have a preference for certain types of blog content, you have a few choices:
(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://netmetrics.blogspot.com
For example, I run four cooking blogs (at the time of this writing). One of them has been running longer, which might account for the greater number of readers. But the more popular one also appears to have the most fluctuation. When I run more personal stories about my experiences as a cook, I have less page views. When I run recipes, I have a greater response. Similarly, on another cooking blog, I talk about keeping your food budget down. When I write posts about growing your own veggies or buying time-saving kitchen gadgets, I get a lower response than just plain recipes. But if I combine info about gardening with a recipe into the same post, I get a better response altogether.
To determine if your readers similarly appear to have a preference for certain types of blog content, you have a few choices:
- Ask them. In your posts, occasionally suggest that your readers post a comment or drop you an email if the want to see some specific content. If you're writing a personal diary type of blog, however, it's unlikely that this method will work. In fact, for every person that does respond to this kind of request for any type of blog, many more will not.
- Run a poll. Post an actual polling form somewhere on your blog. (At the time of this writing, ProBlogger has a poll asking what type of posts readers want Darren to write.)
- Categorize each blog post that you write, then create a spreadsheet that matches categories against the page view counts that your web metrics/analytics software gives you. You'll need to have one column for each category. [For those that don't have software to analyze web site visits, I'll post some links in the future, as well as eventually post some Perl and or PHP scripts that do rudimentary analysis.]
(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://netmetrics.blogspot.com
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