Blog Statistics | ronovanwrites

Have you ever checked out where your views come from? If you are like a lot of bloggers you are just happy people show up to read what you offer. For others that are perhaps looking at this as a career thing they are more into details.

I come from a data analysis career. Not that I was one by training or choice, I just somehow had a knack for it and thus there you have it. The reason I look at the statistics we have available to us in or blogs is to see if I am wasting my time with some of the things I do.

I recently added Bloglovin’ to my blog. For those of you not aware, you can connect your blog to Bloglovin’ and people that don’t have an account with your blog world can follow your blog there instead. It’s a pretty cool set up. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now.

If you go to your stats page on WordPress and I suppose other blog platforms are similar you will find a ‘Summaries’ link to click on in the ‘Referrers’ section. This section lets you know where your traffic/visitors are coming from.

If you click on ‘Summaries’ in WordPress you get to see the totals by ‘Referrer’ for the last 7 days and you have other options a well. Well I wanted to see how my Bloglovin’ was doing bring traffic in. The reason I wanted to know is because I go through the trouble of putting the little ‘follow me on bloglovin’ image in each post I do and include a link to my Bloglovin’ page. You don’ t have to do it that way but it’s a way for a reader to see it for sure. Now if there isn’t much traffic coming from it, then why bother, right?

It turns out that Bloglovin’ for the past 7 days is the fourth largest ‘Referrer’ to my blog. The WordPress Reader is first, then Search Engines, then Twitter, then Bloglovin’.

What this means to me is, Bloglovin’ is worth it. You see, you may not have a lot of followers over on Bloglovin’ but people still see your posts and can click. As i get better and better at blogging, at writing better post Titles and content then Bloglovin very well could move up.

One other thing you might won’t to think about is Google+. I have my blog linked all over the place. When a post goes out it also goes to Google+. Here is the problem though. Now I’ve been looking for it and maybe you can help with it, but when you send a post there it is automatically set to private and just your circle of friends sees it. Great right? Sarcasm there a little, actually a lot. So what I have to do is then go in and share it as public. I can’t find a way to set it to be default Public for my posts coming in from my blog.

If you are writing a post in Google+ and share it as Public, then your next post you write in Google+ is supposed to be Public. I think I’ve tried that and it worked. It’s just any scheduled items don’t do it. Is it worth it? Well I only recently noticed this problem was happening and really only recently connected with Google+ so I will have to get back to you. I have had some visitors though.

Twitter is my third place provider of ‘Referrers’. This takes no effort really other than typing in some hashtag words in my ‘Publicize’ box in my blog post editor. That’s right, I don’t even have to go to Twitter. As long as I am connected to it, I’m good. I’ll give you a couple of cool tips for Twitter another day. I know people are scared of Twitter, but don’t be. It is not difficult at all.

So kick back and enjoy some simple ways to make your blog work for you.

Well that’s about it. Use what you want, ignore what you don’t, right?

Much Respect and Love to Y’all

Ronovan

And hey, wait a minute. See that image over there? Click it and follow me on bloglovin’.

Blogging Tips: Curious about where your ‘view traffic’ is coming from?

by: Ronovan

“I don’t care where it comes from as long as I get it!”

That’s the attitude of most or at least many of those with websites, depending on the purpose of the site. If you are just wishing to share your creativity, then this article is not for you. This article is for those wanting to increase viewership and perhaps their online presence for professional reasons or maybe even just curious about where and how people find them.

For those falling into the second category, the following I give you in response to the “I don’t care…” comment.

“Seriously? Seriously? I can’t believe you thought that.”

Maybe it’s the former data analysis guy in me, yeah, I did that too on top of having been a teacher and other things…cry with me now…okay now on with the show, but I want to KNOW.

You want to grow your readership like a web, not a straight line. By straight line I mean with only one source of followers/readers/viewers. This can mean just your friends or family or fellow bloggers. You want ALL of that and more. With a web you don’t depend on one type of viewer.

On your WordPress Stats page you can see under Referrers where your visitors are coming from. It may be;

Reader
Dashboard
Twitter
Or even a link on another bloggers page.

For those who are striving for web presence, you need to know these things.

REFERRERS information

You can view this information by;

Current Day
Yesterday
Summaries. Within Summaries you have other time span options.

If I click on my ‘All time’ option, which is my entire blog history, I can see that the WordPress.com Reader and Twitter are basically tied for first place in Referrers with dailypost.wordpress.com and WordPress Dashboard almost tied for third.

If I look at the ‘7 Days’ option I see that dailypost.wordpress.com is first, Twitter is second, and WordPress.com Reader is third.

I know why dailypost.wordpress.com reader is in first with a huge increase. I started the Writing 101 Blogging University this past Monday and participants post links to their assignments on a certain page for others to click and see.

I look at both big picture and little picture to see how things have been and how things are recently. If my Reader response is dying off, I have to determine why. If Twitter is dying, then why is it?

Twitter

If you use Twitter you can also see if your Tweets are generating clicks back to your articles.

Go to the ‘gear’ in the upper right corner of the screen, click and then click Analytics
You can then look at each Tweet and see the number of clicks that each resulted in, within the body of the Tweet in the first column, how many Faves you received, Retweets, and Replies. You may also see something that says 4XNormal Reach or some other number. That means you reached that much more of your normal audience with that Tweet due to ReTweets (RT).

There are more data options to view but these are the Twitter options I want to look at for our purpose today.

This information can help you look at when things happen and what content you put out that either increased or decreased your site traffic. I’m not saying you should write to increase traffic, unless that is your purpose. If that is your purpose then you need to use what you have available to you.

If you look at my categories and offerings you will see I am random and just write whatever comes to mind. But some want to keep their site within a certain theme. In the Analytics of Twitter you can even see the interests by percentage of your Followers to see if you are reaching the people you want to reach. But that is for another article another time.

Write and create for you and as long as it is honest creativity you WILL find your audience.

(I would have included images of my traffic numbers but they are so much lower than everyone else’s that I didn’t.)

Spread this stuff everywhere!

Spread this stuff everywhere!