Wednesday, January 5, 2011

In your corner

In a previous post, I looked at my blogging stats for 2010. As I mentioned - I'm not incredibly good at analyzing stats. Still, I think it's important that I take a look at those numbers and try and figure out what they can teach me.

Most of my hits were off of windows operating systems, using either Internet Explorer or Firefox. Not a lot of Mac users, but I expect that will increase over time. Mobile was big enough to make me think that a more mobile-friendly layout might be worth the effort. More and more people use iPhones, droids and netbook devices to browse blogs and keep up with what they're reading. If they can't get to you - they can't read (or share) you, either.

Speaking of sharing, the fact that my more recent posts were somewhat popular is probably largely due to two major changes I made at the end of the year. One - I started posting on my facebook, which draws my friends and family to the blog. Many are not internet-savvy. (I think some may even think facebook is the internet.) They won't necessarily go looking for my blog (although a couple have - thank you!), but if it shows up in their feed, they'll click. More recently, I've also taken to tweeting links to my blog posts more than once a day. I'm thinking this helped hit people in different time zones or with differing twitter habits.

I can also tell from looking at my sources that commenting and guest-posting helped drive a lot of traffic my way. Twitter.com was my largest source - but it was followed closely by timesunion.com and Cute~Ella's blog. Both are sites where I contribute, where I guest-posted and where I comment regularly. I also generated some traffic through Quote Garden; earlier this year, I won a twitter contest and had an original quote posted on that site. Asking the site author to share a link to my blog definitely impacted my blog traffic.

What have I learned? Blogging is about community. If you're active in the community, and willing to put yourself out there - you'll get something back. You can stay in your little corner of the world - but only for so long.

"You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes." Winnie the Pooh

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