It’s hard to get your blog to the top, especially if you’re blogging about “making money online” or something similar.
But the key to it is to keep blogging and never quit, no matter how slight the odds are that you will succeed with your efforts. How do you keep going? You need an inspiration. And what is the best blogging inspiration out there?
Unexpectedly, it’s your traffic stats.
“Whaaaatt??”
First, let me explain. Right now you may be thinking that your stats only make you feel down about yourself and your blog, but I strongly disagree – you’re looking at it the wrong way, the un-optimistic way. Remember, blogging, no matter what niche, is all about setting goals and having optimism and ambition. So what is the right way of looking at your stats? If you’re blog is growing, it should be obvious. Comparing your blog traffic from this month to another month in the past for example, is good inspiration. When I see my traffic increasing, I am always motivated to work-work-work.
Reading Your Stats
By stats, I mean any script or plugin that tracks how many visitors you get and is capable of comparing traffic from one period of time to another. If you know anything about traffic analysis, then you know that Google Analytics is the best choice. Since it’s free, there’s no reason not to get started today. For the rest of this post, I’m going to have my writing geared to bloggers who are using Google Analytics, but even if you aren’t, there should be a way to do something similar using your own tracker, so just keep reading.
A handy feature of Google Analytics is that you can see how your site has grown over the last 30 days compared to the 30 days before it. In other words, it compares the current month to the last using a percentage. This is all from the account view. Yup, you don’t even have to be in your Dashboard to be inspired by your statistics. I’ll call this metric the “Account Overlook”. But if you want a more detailed and more motivational view, you’ll have dive into your Dashboard. Your account overlook only compares how many visits you are getting, and not the most important piece of data, the amount of actual people coming to your website, or visitors. But from your dashboard you can view and compare to the past all of the main statistics available in Google Analytics, including visits, pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site, new visits, and visitors. Combined these stats will encourage you to keep blogging and keep growing.
Conclusion
Although you probably didn’t realize it until now, your increasing traffic stats are the best inspiration for working and writing as a blogger. Google Analytics is just one example of how you can use your stats to achieve this effect. After all, every webmaster loves to see cold-hard proof that their website is growing, and statistics are it.
Thanks for reading! I hope you got a lot from this article, and I hope it will encourage you to use your traffic tracker in a whole new way. Be sure to retweet and share! 🙂
Image credit: Butterflies