It is good to step back once in a while and analyze the effectiveness of what we are doing on our blogs. It takes our valuable time to blog, so is your phone ringing as a direct result of your sharing helpful information online? Do people call you and tell you that they are interested in working with you? Perhaps they feel that they already know you through your writing.
If the above is even occasionally true, then your blogging is being effective. If you want to have it happen more often (who doesn't) then why not take a look at your stats and see what posts are the most effective for you. When you discover what is working best, then think about how you can duplicate that success. What type of posts have the best response?
Go to your Stats page. (Stats is a link on the gray nav bar at the top of each AR page) At first it is listed in order of most recent post. However, at the top of each column is a heading that is clickable. When you click a heading, it sorts it by that column. The most important metric there is "Clicks". That means somebody clicked all the way into your blog post
(whereas "views" means that it just showed up on a newsfeed, like a groups newsfeed or a following newsfeed but the person did not actually see your whole post. At least, that is how "views" used to work. It no longer works that way and I believe in a future release it will be taken off as this number is no longer counted any differently than "clicks")
What would actually be an interesting metric to see (let me ping Bob Stewart to put a bug in his ear) would be to have a subtotal of clicks from non-AR-member persons. That would tell us how many clicks are coming inbound from a true SEO hit and not just our fellow ARs reading their daily newsfeed.
Since we are talking wishlists for future releases, let me also put in my request for an 'Export" link where we get our whole blog list in CSV or Excel format. Then we could really go through our numbers without having to "next page" ourselves to infinity.
Have you been to bootcamp? Even if yes, have you been recently??
If you want to get your stats to improve I've got a little URL that you will want to bookmark
http://activerain.com/bootcamp
On that page you will find links to all the recordings of the classes. Take good notes and put it into practice ASAP!
I have a little different audience than you-all, because you are my audience. I expect most of my clicks to be internal and not SEO hits. However, looking at my stats is still helpful for me to find the types of articles that you like best. Here is my top 5 "most clicked" posts.
| Date | Title | Comments |
Views
|
Clicks
|
Short URL Clicks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 05/12/2011 | Customizing and Embedding Google Maps  Featured |
111 | 16887 | 14356 | 506 |
| 06/08/2011 | Getting Points for Comments (In More Ways Than One) Featured |
228 | 16943 | 11100 | — |
| 10/17/2012 | HTML in Your ActiveRain Posts - It's Easier Now! Featured |
108 | 14841 | 7888 | — |
| 05/01/2011 | Craig's Classroom Catalog Featured |
185 | 11436 | 7785 | 345 |
| 09/27/2012 | Posting to ActiveRain Channels Featured |
61 | 14552 | 7559 | — |
What can also be interesting is to click to sort the "Comments" heading. Which of your posts had the most discussion? It is a fun milestone to get posts with over 100 comments. Perhaps you've had a few of those too!
Now it is your turn to check your stats.
Sort your list by most clicks.
Share it with us...
Come back here and copy/paste your top two hits in a comment.
Copy/Paste so we get the title and the hyperlink and the count #s
so we can go visit your posts too.
Do you hear that, it is the sound of another "click!"
Comments(22)