Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
II
Once you know and understand your numbers, you'll want to know how to increase them.
WordPress offers many tools for doing just that. Getting someone to visit your blog is half the
battle; helping them get the most out of it is the other half.
One great tool for doing this is RSS feeds. The RSS feed widget brings in content from other sites
and other blogs to your blog, enhancing its attractiveness. You can also make it easier for others to
subscribe to your blog.
With all this in mind, we'll take you through Google Voice Daily, the blog of one of the authors
(Smith). We'll show you what works and what doesn't.
WordPress Statistics
It's easy to take WordPress's statistics for granted. You should be aware, though, that they're really,
really good.
The whole area of Internet statistics is a minefield of claims and counterclaims. By giving you total
views in a nice chart and breaking down the source and destination of your views in several sepa-
rate, easy-to-use charts, WordPress really distinguishes itself.
One reason for the value of WordPress's statistics is their focus on visits. Because WordPress.com is
relentlessly noncommercial, so are the stats WordPress provides. This is actually a valuable per-
spective even if you have a commercial purpose for your blog. You have to get visitors before you
can—here's that ugly word again—monetize them.
You might want—and you can get—many alternatives for statistics for your blog. The built-in statis-
tics, though, are probably the best quick overview you're likely to get.
In this section, we take you through the statistics in some depth. It's worth it—everything you learn
will be valuable in understanding your blog's growth (or lack thereof) as shown in WordPress statis-
tics, and will also help you approach other statistics packages from a well-informed point of view.
Why Are You Doing This?
All of us who blog find that getting the blog postings up and edited, then encouraging and
responding to comments, can seem like a full-time job.
If you also pay much attention to blog statistics, though, it really does become a full-time job. That's
because increasing—let alone truly maximizing—traffic to your blog is like running a rapid-response
room in politics. You need to be working on an hour-by-hour basis to see what's happening in the
world, the response on blogs similar to yours, and how you can make your voice heard in the fray.
And this is without even considering monetization.
Trying to make money from your blog, in addition to actually running it and tracking stats, can
really put you over the edge. Most monetization efforts take a great deal of time, and many months
to even begin to show results—and some efforts never do produce results.
Several prominent bloggers have quit, complaining of exhaustion from a job that's 24/7 with no
natural breaks on which to take a day off, let alone a proper vacation. And trying to blog from a
BlackBerry or an iPhone while sitting on a beach somewhere may just mean that you're doing a
lousy job of blogging as well as a lousy job of taking a holiday.
