One of the first ‘”blogging truths” most of us hear when we start blogging, is that you can measure the health of your blog by looking at its traffic. This idea has caused me some confusion for months, as I’ve watched my blog appear to be growing steadily, yet the traffic doesn’t reflect that….
For example, my blog, The Viral Garden, had its best month ever for traffic in January. But the number of visitors to The Viral Garden was barely above the amount for my second-best month, which was last July. Since then, traffic has been up about 10%. To me, that’s pretty modest growth.
And it didn’t make sense. I’ve seen my number of links shoot up, and it seemed like most posts on the Garden were getting more comments. Everything pointed to a healthy blog, except for the traffic reports.
So I decided to take a much closer look at my blog’s stats. I started with links. Since last July, The Viral Garden’s number of links has gone from around 100, to just over 400 now. So we’ll say links are up 300%.
Then I checked the number of comments per post. In July, each post left on The Viral Garden averaged around 4.5 comments per post. For January, that number had increased to just over 7 comments per post. So comments per post is up about 60%.
The final stat I wanted to look at was my feed readers. This is an area that I had never really tracked over time. I had an idea of how many people were subscribed to my feeds at any time, but I wasn’t aware of how that number was trending. Again using the July starting point, I discovered that while my blog’s traffic was only up about 10% in the last 7 months, feed readers were up around 360%. There is the growth I was expecting to see from traffic.
But as I thought about it, it would make more sense for feed readers to be up sharply, given the growth I am also seeing in links and comments. Feed readers are readers that regularly read your blog, so logic dictates they would also be the readers that are more likely to link to, and comment on your blog. My guess is that as traffic is slowly increasing, new visitors are switching over and becoming subscribers, and aren’t counting in the visitor stats from that point on.
I guess it comes down to how you want to judge the health of your blog. Increased traffic is great for some, but I would rather see those visitors become regular readers, and start to contribute to my blog via comments and emails, so I can learn from, and get to know them. The sense of interaction and community is much more important to me than being able to say that a few thousand anonymous IP addresses came and left my blog today.
So if your blog traffic isn’t where you think it should be, check your number of feed readers and comments per post. You may find that your blog is not only doing just fine, but that you’ve spent the entire time looking at the wrong stat to judge your blog’s health.
I know a lot of people use RSS feeds and find them immensely valuable, but to me, there is something impersonal about it. So a long time ago I gave up my RSS feeder.
On the blogger’s site I can be more random in what I read or click through to … I can gain a sense of the author’s personality as expressed through their design (or lack of) and importantly, I can choose to join in the discussion if I want to.
The immediacy of interaction is what I miss with the feeds.
Gavin that to me is the big limitation to RSS feeds, you can’t physically see the blog, and it’s more difficult to read comments.
But for me, feed readers are more important than traffic, because feed readers are more likely to be the regular readers that will comment and contribute.
I feel suddenly validated by you both! I dislike feed readers for the reasons you mention — they feel impersonal; I don’t get a feel for personality, other contributors or commenters; and they lack context. I always feel so… well, Web 1.0 when I discuss my true feelings, however….
Bottom line: Feed readers always feel like the equivalent of a fast-food window: they fill you up, but they leave me wholly unsatisfied.
For the longest time, I refused to use Bloglines simply because I wanted to physically go to the blogs and read the comments. But I kept bookmarking more and more blogs till one day I realized that my small group of 15 or so ‘must-read’ blogs had grown to 4 or 5 times that number. That’s when I had to cave and go with Bloglines.
So I still comment as much, just over more blogs. And instead of being able to check on every blog daily, I try to check them all 2-3 times a week.
Mack: Curious to know how you’re tracking feed subscriptions.
All: I’m currently tracking over 130 feeds. While I won’t claim to read every single post from every single feed, I am sure that I would visit 130+ websites as often as I check my newsreader. That’s the beauty of it to me.
I agree it’s an impersonal approach, but it’s just too practical to give up.
Hi Mack, Gavin, and Anne – I’m a bit of a numbers junkie (I think it began while reading the backs of baseball cards) so eat up your stats posts, Mack. And like you its the conversation I truly crave. Thats the cool thing about marketing – we get a little bit of both.
I started using a RSS reader about a year ago – mostly out of curiousity…how’s this work? what’s it do? whats the big deal? I went a little nuts subscribing. It became overwhelming to keep up with all the posts. About a week ago, I reintroduced myself to the Google reader. I’ve narrowed my choices – although Logic and Emotion, Servant of Chaos, and Viral Garden remain my carryovers. MP Daily Fix is locked and loaded now. We’ll see how it goes.
What I DO like is it gives me a quick view of what everyone is writing. I also like the “share” feature. It gives the option of showing items I find of value with anyone who visits One Reader.
Correction: Meant to say, “I’m sure I wouldn’t visit visit 130+ websites as often as I check my newsreader.”
The measurement I’m most interested in is overall readership. I want to know how many people are reading my blog. I know that I can only guess at it, but if I guess with the same parameters all the time, I can at least see trends in my readership – is it going up, down or remaining about the same?
Any boy, I find feed readers to be indispensable. They let me read and learn about blogging before I launched my blog. And now they let me stay up to date with what my peers are writing about. I think it’s a mistake not to include a feed link.
Mark I’m using Feed Burner to track how many feed readers read my blog via my feeds each day. If you go to my blog, The Viral Garden, you’ll see a ‘chicklet’ on the right sidebar that tells everyone how many feed readers accessed my feed in the previous day. I also subscribe to all my feeds via Bloglines. I do this to make sure the posts look ok when they are viewed via BlogLines, but I can also see how many subscribers I have for each feed.
Bob I think the feed readers are mostly a convenience feature. It allows you to quickly read/scan your favorite blogs/sites. Personally I prefer to simply visit the blogs and read the comments, as Gavin was saying, but as time goes by, I keep finding more and more great blogs, and BlogLines is really the only way I can keep up.
I’ve added a couple of nice little “AddThis” buttons to my blog, one for subscribing, the other for bookmarking. Check out addthis.com, but it essentially boils down to this: they provide the buttons for your site so you don’t have to have a heavy page of buttons (ugly!) for all the different readers/social bookmarking sites. In addition, they’ll give you stats on the number of subscribers and the times your posts have been bookmarked.
Pretty cool service.
Thanks Mark, yes I don’t like too many buttons either. I need to get set up with MyBlogLog as well, but I cringe every time I have to fiddle with the Blogger Template, Blogger is buggy enough as it is without needing further inspiration from me
Mark, thanks for the insight. I’m pretty new to blogging myself (although I’ve been reading for a while – I prefer going to the blog rather than reading through a reader). I’m pleased with where my traffic has been going to start off, but I also realize that, like you’ve said, the feed stats have got to be the real indicators on the health of your blog.
Thanks to everyone on the other tips to adding buttons and such.
Hi Mack,
We’ve seen pretty much the same phenomenon – while our visitors/pageviews even dipped for a little while between october and january, and overall showing a steady but slow growth from 400 average per day to 600 between june and now, feedreadership (using Feedburner too) more then tripled, from 500 per day to 1700+.
I take that number as the key measurement of how we are doing – plus the visitor loyalty results in Google Analytics.
Do I have an actual idea how many readers we have though? No… It’s all very much open to interpretation. Depending on definitions we could claim anywhere between 5000 and 25000 ‘regular’ readers. It drives me crazy
But a good tip for everyone indeed – check your feedsubscriptions (and if you dont use Feedburner, start doing so soon!)
Stefan
Have you seen the Easy Viral Traffic blog yet? They provide some pretty cool information about how to get free website traffic… check it out http://www.easy-viral-traffic.com/blog/
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