“Only on the Internet can a person be lonely and popular at the same time” Allison Burnett
Blogging 201, Day Four: Give ‘Em What They Want
Time to take a step back. Live with the design you have for the day while we switch gears and start focusing on your content. We’re diving into stats to learn more about what your readers love.
Today’s assignment: Do a basic stats analysis to help you create an editorial calendar for the next 30 days.
Why do this? Because knowing which topics and posts are popular helps you to brainstorm new content your audience will love. Because knowing which days of the week your visitors are most likely to show up lets you plan to publish on your best days.
I have been following the statistics of my blog since day one, six months ago. Call it anal, call it interested, call it day job orientated motivation 😉 Keeping track on who, when, why is interesting. I quickly started utilizing the categories and tags for the posts. This helps on many levels; search, number or posts, statistics.
Due to working in full time employment in a completely different area means, that when I arrive back home, I start my second (albeit unpaid) job. This means all the brainstorming, writing and photographing happen between the hours of 5pm and usually 1 am, sometimes I am up until the sunrise next morning if I really have my inspiration on.
Since I am posting on daily basis now, with current setup of at least one poem and some photographs, there is no time to accumulate a backlog and vary the posting times. Luckily for me, this posting time (midnight for me) usually tends to be the busiest. Even my statistics sheet agrees!
My topics are as the blog tag line states: “Blog about everything and nothing and it’s all done in the best possible taste.” Meaning the content can be open to most every topic I can imagine. Possibly due to the simple fact, that humour plays a big role in most postings and adding photography to the mix, my followers seem to range from ages 0-100+ with all genders included. Of course it is impossible to please everyone all the time, but I do have quite a few returning visitors and I try to do the same to my followings as well.
For statistics there is one qualm I have: those people who are not part of the WordPress community, cannot press the “LIKE” button. My followers by email only, exceed by two thirds the number of followers in the community. This also means I don’t get feedback from the email followers, unless they write me email or respond in the other social media forums.
