Are you Secretive About Your Blog Stats?
Last night, chatting with @ReadilyAParent @The_Moiderer @swhittle @eggscreamhoney and @BumblingTweets on twitter about pimping blog posts from Twitter, we shared our blog visit numbers for last month and the % that come from Twitter.
It was very interesting, some people getting 22% of their visitors from Twitter, and others like me, getting around 9%.
But the divulging of stats like that, in such an open arena, made me feel nervous. So nervous that I quickly steered my end of the conversation to more base subjects like the amount of people that had come here from Google looking for sodomy vlogs or ‘standing around naked parties’.
I felt like I had done something wrong. As though I’d broken some cardinal rule of blogging. Stats are such closely guarded secrets, maybe there is a reason for it I don’t yet understand. Maybe something terrible is going to happen to me and my blog now that I told Twitter (or the five people that were reading at the time) how many monthly visits I got in the last month.
Ummm.
Or maybe not.
I’m thinking probably not.
So why do we feel this way? What is the reason behind keeping our blog stats a secret? Why don’t we want anyone to know how many visits we do or don’t get?
Is it because we think people will judge us? Will stop reading our blog? And if they did would it be because we get more than they think? Less than they think?
Do we believe that people will somehow be able to ‘steal’ our readers if they know how many we have?
Do we secretly want people to think there are thousands upon thousands of people flocking to our blogs each month?
Do we even understand half the numbers and whattsits that we guard so well? I know I don’t. What the hell is a bounce rate, anyway?
So having decided that I don’t care if you know how many visit I get or how many of them were wearing pink undies at the time (Google analytics can tell you an awful lot about about your visitors) I figured I’d share mine with you.
Just in case you were interested.
We can use it as an experiment.
Right now I have 330 feedburner subscribers and 206 google followers (gah, I hate that word). We can see if this dips dramatically after revealing my stats. Those numbers aren’t a secret by any means. If you scroll to the bottom of my blog you’ll see the number of feedburner subscribers down there on a little widget and the google followers (there it is again – can we not come up with a better word Google?) is in my sidebar.
Also at the bottom, for anyone that cares, is a sitemeter button. Sitemeter is an open stats package which means that anyone can view it. If you click that button you will get an up to the minute reading on how many people have been here today, where they came from, how long they stayed and what they had for breakfast.
Okay I might have made one of those up.
Anyhoo…
From the 10th March 2010 to 9th April 2010
Google Analytics.
Visits: 4,494
Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,730
Page Views: 10,336
Average Page Views: 2.3
Time On site: 2:32
Bounce Rate: 49.35%
New Visits: 29.06%
They came from 53 different countries: UK, USA, and Finland being the top three
I know that 30% came from feedburner, 10% came direct, 9% from Twitter, 5% from google search and 79 people came from my feedburner email feed.
The majority of people coming from Google search come looking for Lapland porn in some form or another.
And now you know all that fairly useless info does it change your or my life at all?
*Waits for the apocolyptical meteor to hit her*
Whilst I’m sitting here waiting to be struck down by the blogging Gods, why not tell me what you think. Why do we keep them a secret? Does it matter if people know how many readers you have?
Feel free to share your own if you want to.
I'm Heather, an ex expat, now back in blighty and living in Lancashire. Which is just like Lapland only less snowy...and stuff.
Go to google and type in ‘google analytics’ and you’ll find it.
I can’t give you the link to the main site without signing out and that
signs me out of all of google and is a pain in the arse.
Yeah, it gives you a lot of stuff. most of it completely useless lol
Brave/stupid, it’s a fine line. As you say, there will always be people
with better and worse stats, they are just numbers, most of which i don’t
even understand anyway. lol
oh excellent, a mystery solved! thank you.
40% from Twitter? wow! i need to start pimping my blog out more lol
at least we’ll go down together now, huh? lol Maybe they’ll let us share a
room in bloggy jail?
Wow that’s pretty comprehensive data. how do you get google analytics? I use stat counter. Haven’t checked for a while and must go look now but I suspect it will be much lower than your number of unique visits!
OOh look I’m the first!!
I think you’re very brave – but then your stats are very good considering how long you’ve been blogging. Mine are much poorer (sob, sob). No I’m not going to tell anyone them, because it’s like admitting to failure. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter, that it’s not a popularity contest, but deep down it does matter. I suppose there will always be people with better and worse stats, and we should be more philosophical about it. Also I suppose if you have very high stats, you might not want people to feel you are ‘bragging’ about it. I admire your honesty, but then I think it is partly that very honesty which makes you so successful.
Well, first thing’s first…Bounce Rate is how quickly people leave your site after clicking onto it. You would like a Bounce Rate under 50%. You want to keep your site “sticky”…keeping people there as long as possible.
Stats…I check them once or twice throughout the week but as I don’t know everyone else’s it’s hard to know whether they’re good or not. All I gauge is whether they’re going up from the previous day/week/month. I know that my weekend stats are RUBBISH but I think that everyone’s are as we all are spending time with our families and not with our blogs which is as it should be. One of the only stats I have particularly cared about is Technorati as I’ve only just succeeded in cracking it. I know that the top bloggers are in the high 400-low 600 for their Technorati authority so it helps me to know where I stand there. Otherwise, I could care less. PR’s always want to know your site stats so that’s about the only time I take an indepth look. I would say my traffic via Twitter is more like 40%…I would be no where without Twitter but I’m very active on Twitter as well.
That’s my story woman…don’t worry about the Twitter Gods…I think they’ll let you be!
Karin
I do feel my life has changed now I know your stats lol, I have Google analytics too although I rarely use it but here’s my stats.
Visits: 4,319
Absolute Unique Visitors: 2167
Page Views: 7728
Average Page Views: 1.79
Time On site: 2:07
Bounce Rate: 69.35%
New Visits: 43.69%
Followers :137
Am I going to be struck down by the blog gods as well now then?
There was a time when this discussion would have made me feel very uncomfortable. I’d have lots of silent fuming ‘look at that!’ grumps and feel inferior.
But, now…not so much.
What’s changed? An understanding that our sites are different so it’s really comparing apples and pears. What’s even more interesting is that I get two different reports depending on whether I use Statcounter or Google Analytics.
For example on Statcounter – page views for same period are
5,014 (1/2 yours!) but unique visitors are 3,106 Visitors tend to stay on my site longer average being 4.18 minutes but the bounce rate is higher at 60%. What does this tell me? People go onto my site to read something, and as my posts are typically considerably longer than average the fact that people are staying to read is a good thing! If they turn up on my site and don’t stay it’s because it isn’t their thing, they were looking for something that required less time investment. Incidentally I have changed my front page to give inserts and reading times to help with this prob. New visits are 35.59% which is great because it means my blog is growing – not exponentially but steadily. Oh and my Twitter rate is 16%. 43% of my traffic comes from referring sites, which I think is pretty cool actually. I’m happy with that. I can also tell that the site is growing as the new stats are marking an improvement to 50% of new visitors being attracted.
So there. Not so scary really. I can understand the stats and I’m quite happy to share them. I have got Technorati to claim my new blog but it still languishes at an authority of 1. THe old blog (which I haven’t posted to for about two months) still has 131 and has increased it’s position over 300! Weird! Google blogsearch doesn’t like my WordPress blog much but I do have over 800 live links.
There you go. Now feeling all naked as I do I shall go and put some clothes on. Or perhaps join you in the naked sauna?
How funny – I was just reading your site when you posted a comment on mine. Telepathy and all that – or does your Google Paralytics thing tell you I’m reading your blog?
Anyway, I’ve never been secretive about stats as I don’t really care either way. I write the blog for myself and friends and family and anyone else is more than welcome to visit.
I have StatCounter, which I look at now and then, and Feedjit that I rarely look at. I usually get about 100 page loads a day, whatever that means, and my stats since starting my blog three years ago are pushing towards 59,000.
I mentioned an incident on my blog a few weeks back when the StatCounter thingy seemed to go mad. My wife had noticed the Feedjit updating every second and my page loads hit 2,000 on one day. Here’s why:
http://wwwtheothersideofparis.blogspot.com/2010/02/snowed-under-by-figures.html
I suppose if I were trying to make money from my blog I would take the figures seriously and try to improve them. But I’m not so it’s all jolly good fun.
Bon weekend!
Come on in the sauna, it’s lovely and warm.
You hit the nail right on the head, we shouldn’t compare blogs with others really because they are none of them the same. Yours a re longer, well written pieces, mine tend to be fast to read silly things
You average time is brilliant, it means your readers really like you writing – as we know us interent readers are a fickle bunch. you ought to be really proud of that!
Not so scary at all, huh?
Ooher. I have no idea about all this stuff. I installed Google Analytics and after a day of going ‘ooh’ promptly forgot about it. My wordpress stats plugin doesn’t work on my site for some reason. The only thing I look at is ‘who’s online’ which comes with the Visitor Maps plugin. Which is fab, because every user is identified by a little flag. And being a total nerd and lover of world flags (see recent post of mine for details) I get really excited about a visitor from Moscow or South Africa.
I’m going to go and have a look at my stats for you. I’ll be back!
(btw because it’s half term I haven’t had a nanosecond to myself so will add in this message that I meant what I said last month about helping with admin – you just have to shout. xx)
Appallingly, despite having a part time web design business I am amazingly lax about checkin the stats for my blog. I guess deep down I don’t care how many and where from. As long as my little coterie of blog readers / writers keep coming back and commenting I’m perfectly happy. Always happy to get new readers but am happier to keep the ones that I’ve got.
Stats are interesting though.
I don’t share my stats for plain and simple reasons.
1) Mine are crap
2) No one’s interested
3) It’s a bit of competition I could kind of do without
4) Mine are crap
I’m more concerned about traffic data on my business site, as at least I can work out how effective the site actually is. I don’t understand much of the secrecy attached to statistics…I just know that I keep mine because it’s hilarious to see how many people come to my blog to find out about coffee, how coffee might relate to poop, and whether poop and big boobs should be in the same sentence.
As soon as stats readers come up with a way to tell me if my readers eat bacon and are eating while they’re reading my blog, then I’ll be very happy.
Christ i think I’d have fainted if mine started doing that! lol
You know what crazy woman in Lapland… you taught me that.. Thanks so much, it’s changed everything. Much love and please put some more water on the coals..
As a still fairly new blogger I am a bit obsessed with stats. I was on a steady up till I started work and my average posts per week dropped, my readership dropped big style too! BUT, what I havn’t taken into account is it’s probably the same amount of people as before just fewer blogs for them to visit for. I don’t have many subscribers and as I only use wordpress stats, I don’t have a clue how many people view in google reader! I think stats are an important tool to know what people think but ulitmately only comments tell you what people really think and for some reason my comment rate has dropped right off and i get hardly any comments these days! Thats really hard to get my head round, because it could be people are visiting my site and leaving without reading!
Anaytics goes so deep about people and what browser they were suing, internet speed…it all seems very odd. Perhaps useful to some but to us mere bloggers it’s all a bit ott, i think.
I lvoe reading the google search terms. they make me laugh.
and thank you. I’m working all the admin stuff out coming up with better systems etc but i shall bare your offer in mind xx
they are interesting to presue once in a while, but i don’t understand the whole secrecy between bloggers thing. all very odd.
good reminder to come over and read you blog, haven’t been reading any for a while whilst working on my new webstie – bad Heather *smacks own hand* will be over shortly.
Okay, here we are:
Google Analytics – 10/3 to 9/4
1958 visits
3992 page views
2.4% pages/visit
62% bounce rate
3:10 avg time on site
30% new visits
Does that mean anything to me? Not really. I have been blogging since 2004, but privately, at Livejournal. It’s only since I started training for the marathon that I started my breakaway blog. I am an incredibly private person, and I find public blogging very difficult. I have achieved what I aimed to do – I’ve raised awareness of Heart Research UK, I’ve kept a record of my training for the London Marathon, I’m on track to reach my fundraising target. So that’s all good. At the end of the day, it’s only a blog.
ah yes, the competition thing is an ugly one huh? although, i think that those that are going to get their knickers in a twist about them are the people that already have them in a twist anyway, if you see what i mean. And keeping them such a closely guarded secret kinda makes people more competitive. maybe. Oh hell, I dunno i just like reading what pervy search terms brought them here
Poop and big boobs should never be mixed. In fact and poop and boobs, big or small should never come into contact. ‘kay? just thought i’d clear that up.
Oh search terms are funny – some of mine have been: blow job (truly), dirty stories 2010, mummy bloggers are sad and irrelevant..
It is probably the same number but less for them to read so they come less often. I find when I don’t comment on so many blogs i get less comments and I’m guessing with going back to work that your commenting on other blogs has decreased too. that’s probably why.
and very glad that you started your breakaway blog we are too! i think stats are interesting but not the be all and end all of life. A very healthy attitude you have there
My top search term is ‘I’m losing the plot’ but we also have ‘crap marathon runner’ ‘too fat to run a marathon’ ‘prefer chocolate to eating’ and funnily enough not many ‘gosh she’s fab at running, I must log on to marathonmummy.com immediately’. Hrmm.
ha ha ha, mummy bloggers and sad and irrelevent! lol.
Ooh, I had a look at your business website yesterday. The photos are beautiful. How are you at rounding up whole herds of children and getting a photo? I dream of having a picture of all four children…
So, when do we get the lapland porn?
I’ve got google analytics, sitemeter, that feedburner button thingy on mine. There was a time when I had even more. I take no more than a passing interest in the whole thing. It’s good to see which of my posts have the highest visits (will write more like them then) but otherwise the numbers aren’t really my thing. I prefer the comments and the discussions that get in to them.
Sally ran a similiar discussion to this a while back. Personally I don’t care how many readers other bloggers have, it has absolutely no influence on me or whether or not I decide to read the blog, I care about who reads my blog (and not just other bloggers). I’m confident I have good stats and I share them with the people who need to know, and for me, like Karin, that’s PRs. For everyone else I think it’s probably totally irrelevant.
No sense of adventure. *tsk*
I blogged about this very issue back in December (http://www.whosthemummy.co.uk/2009/11/vital-statistics-why-so-shy-.html)
I think people are secretive because they’re competitive. It’s the blogging equivalent of penis size. If I get 400 uniques a day but someone else gets 500, they are better than me. They wield more power and influence.
What came out of the openness on my blog was actually comforting though – the vast, vast majority of parenting blogs get around 100 visitors a day or less. Even the top sites probably don’t get much more than 500.
It’s a shame we’re not more open because I think it would help people see the gap between their blog and a “top” blog is a LOT smaller than they imagine it to be.
Second, understanding blog stats isn’t that hard and can be very useful – not just in making money but in building an audience and understanding what people like to read, how they read it, and when. That’s good stuff for any blogger to know.
I really don’t understand why people get so hung up on this. A few times I’ve joined in discussions on this, and given out my stats and I’M THE ONLY ONE. I kind of thought that if I volunteered my information, other people would too, but it seems not. So in the spirit of sharing, here’s what I’ve got. I don’t use Google analytics, just wordpress…
Last month I had 3,771 page views or about 100 a day
I got over 200 referrals from Twitter & 25 from Notes from Lapland!
My google searches are quite varied, lots for children peeing, lots for Its a small world, lots for how to catch a crab
According to my Google reader I have 57 subscribers
I’m at 25 in Tots 100. I have good ratings in the various rankings because I have a relatively high number of inlinks to page views.
There, wasn’t so hard was it? I suspect the majority of people are like me. I don’t run any community things that people join in with (apart from a couple of small carnivals), I get tagged for memes but don’t often take part, largely through forgetting or laziness than any other reason. I take part in other people’s schemes like the writing workshop, justvlogit and the gallery. I’m not active on BMB, so I don’t think I get any readers from there. I don’t get large numbers of comments, maybe 10 a post. Generally most of my readers come from the blogosphere, I don’t think many friends and family read my blog, although that’ll change once we start travelling.
For some people, it’s probably a big deal. For me, well, I don’t even know what my stats are and seriously I don’t care. I am delighted to see whenever I get a new ‘flower’ in my blogging garden (much better than follower. hate the word too). Maybe it’s because I only started a few months back and don’t expect to have too many people reading yet. I have 32 at the moment and that suits me just fine!
I had a little gadget on my blog that showed me which parts of the world people were visiting from (mainly uk) and it was exciting if somebody turned up from overseas, it also had a picture like slices of cake all about the return visitors and so on but as I didn’t understand it I removed it also I was spending too muchtime looking at tryiing to undesrtand it and not getting anything else done! – so now you know I am not only deaf but stupid as well! Why does it matter how many people visit other than to reassure you that somebody somewhere cares?
God, I really need to get my head around all these and try to understand it all, you may as well be speaking Urdu to me with some of this techno talk.
I check my stats via Sitemeter & feedjit, but to be honest I only check the visits & page views per day rather than month, they are generally between 150-250 page views per day when I post and about 70 odd when I don’t post. I have 153 followers but for some reason only 74 rss subscribers (there is obviously something amiss there). Which considering it’s an anonymous blog that’s only been going 6 months, I think that I’m doing OK.
So long as my stats keep increasing then I don’t really care about other peoples, although I will admit to being vaguely nosy about these sorts of things…
Not sure of the percentage of hits I get via twitter although I have noticed it increasing. Most of my hits come direct, I seem to have lost most of my random porn searches since changing my name.
Erms, just went to look at my analytics only yo find it has been 0 for the last 3 months!!!
Thank you! However I may now start pimping furiously all over the interwebs just to see what happens. I’m off to add naked running porn knickerypants to my meta tags and see what happens! Hahaha!
Bother – someone beat me to it after all!
Hypocritically I’m finding this really interesting. I wish I had as healthy an attitude as lots of others here. However, having initially got depressed about my ‘crap’ stats compared to everyone elses, I now feel good about the fact that almost 78% of visits to my blog are from new visitors, and I have about 70 subscribers on average. So at least it’s growing!
I haven’t got a clue what any of the stats mean, bounce, hits, reach etc….sometimes I get a bit peeved that some people keep tweeting their posts over and over again. I very rarely tweet my posts apart from the one that is automatic…most of my posts are pretty depressing and I’m aware it’s not for everyone. If I had stats like yours though I’d be proud of them…I’m just proud that anyone even reads my posts!
Elsewhere that I ‘may’ blog….the majority of traffic comes from Twitter without me pimping massively. I have good hits but not that many subscribers. I also lost over 300 technorati authority ‘points’ in 12 hours on it too. That’s annoying but then I’m not being obsessive or anything….really! ;0)
*throws another ladle of water on coals*
hows that? More wine?
Loving your top search! I wonder why people google terms like that…
running porn knickerypants. i like it. could be name of a blog all in itself! Bet it’d get a lot of traffic!
That’s in the special members only section. didn’t you get the email?
Sounds like a healthy approach to take. Unless you seel advertising i don’t think hits really count that much, comments and interaction are far more important too me.
Not caring about the others is vey healthy i think. although some do, as I was attempting to say to Jay but didn’t quite manage it, I think the hiding or and being secretive about stats can lead to a lot more of a feeling of competition though. where as being more open about them, makes people see that most aren’t that different from their own
*shrugs*
Or maybe not. just a vibe I’ve picked up on.
I think it’s definitely a good thing to not care really though.
yes yes yes! that is what I was trying to say above in the comments to Jay and Liz – that the secretiveness in itself makes some people feel more competitive but if we were all more open about it then everyone would see that there really isn’t too much difference or if there is it isn’t unobtainable. We’re not tlaking thousands of hits a day, but as couple of hundred.
it is strange how many people dont want to talk about, or ‘admit’ their stats, isnt it? all very odd. you’re in good company here though, a few of us have already outed oursleves and discussed it
Some of them are fun to read, like the search engine results that led people and some are useful, as Sally said above, like what they are reading when, but so much of it baffels me. lol
slices of cake? Now that would be distracting! lol but I know what you mean, it is easy to spend too much time worrying about it all, isn’t it?
I’m with you on that. i don’t care about others as in it’s not going to change my life if i find out what other bloggers get, but yeah, i’m interested in a nosy kind a way. *shrugs* It’s probably the same thing that has me looking through peoples bathroom cabinets. lol
did you change your template and lose the code?
Thje fact that so many people get so many of their hits from twitter depresses me. Plugging blogs is killing twitter for me. some people plug their latest post every bloody hour and it completely clogs everything up. Three times in total should be the absolute maximum in my opinion.
As for my stats. Despite being consistantly int he top ten of the tots 100 mine are pretty small fry. Smaller than yours anyhow. Certainly I have under half of your google feed subscribers and average around 120 unique visitors a day.
But you know what? I don’t reallty care. In order to get high readership numbers you have to work so hard smoozing with people and treating blogging like a public relations exercise that it’s almost a full time job. That’s great if that’s what you are into, but personally I can’t be arsed with it.
It’s quality not quantity that I value in the people who come to my blog. This July 11 readers of my blog are coming with me on a 84 mile sponsored walk – I’d rather have that level of friendship than another 400 readers.
Not that I have an issue with anyone with a more popular blog than mine obviously. And I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t quite attracted to thousands of people hanging on my every word. But building that all up isn’t on my priority list currently.
this is why i think it’s a good thing to be more open about them. when you read others, yes you see the bad first but when you look it gives you things to be happy about too, like your new visitor %. Yours is way better than mine! Cool!
I don’t underdtand Technorati at all. i submitted my blog because people said you should but that authority number just confuses me. I’ve stoped even thinking about it.
The constant pimping on Twitter annoys the shit out of me. I unfollow people that do it a lot. We were talking about this a lot last night on Twitter and the general concesous seems to be that 3 links to your post through out the day is enough. i agree. any more and it’s just annoying.
Same here, i hate those people that only tweet their posts and nothing else or do it so much that it gets in the way. but i think after a while you start to block them out, like you do with advertising, you just stop seeing them anymore.
I agree about the stats too, making real friends, the sort that foolishly want to come and meet me for a night out when i’m back in the UK for example is the best part, but i’d be lying if i said I didn’t care about my stats. i like to think it’s a healthy interest
Wow, we’ve started quite the little conversation here, haven’t we? To tell you the truth, Heather, I have wondered at your stats as I’ve always thought If I can really pull things together I might end up with a blog as good as yours.
I revealed mine last night on Twitter, but on average, through a month I get about 33 visits a day. Like you, 8% from Twitter. On really good days I get 70 visitors. However my number of new visitors is always above 50% and my stats keep going up.
I’ve been at it about 4 months. But the first couple of months I didn’t have any analytics and also no idea about how to get visitors. I was sort of relying on my facebook fans and column readers. They tend to be a mostly silent bunch, though. I’m always surprised when I hear someone mention one of my blog posts or columns cause it seems no one’s reading.
The blog is a bit of a PR thing for me as it’s part of the package that comes with my column and facebook page and could help syndication. Plus I would like to sell space to a couple of advertisers in the future, so I figure ideally I’d get 100 visitors a day or 3000 a month.
Which means I need to triple my current stats. But considering my current stats have tripled already in the last couple of months I figure that’s doable.
I did figure that when importing my blog posts as notes onto my facebook page I had a lot more people reading, but they weren’t showing up as visitors because they read it on facebook. But the RSS that supplied it would go days without posting and then post 3 or 4 posts at once which I thought would just annoy people. So now I just go in and post the link, though I don’t think many are clicking on it.
I’ve almost 150 fans on facebook! That’s pretty good, I think.
Anyway, like you I’ve never understood why people hide their stats and why no one will share how much they charge for ads or how many “followers” they need before companies will offer them PR opportunities.
It’s all very confusing to me.
I never saw this as an issue before, being honest, but then again I don’t consider myself ‘up there’ with bigger bloggers like yourself either so wouldn’t even attempt to compete. My stats are about half of yours and I am happy with them, my bounce rate is higher. I love google analytics because the detail amazes me but knowing the info doesn’t really change how I run my blog either – I am who I am kind of thing:) Interesting post, will be following other responses:) Jen.l
Hey Brave Lady!
I still don’t get the whole secrecy thing and I think a lot of people would be surprised that probably everyone gets similarish stats – the world will not end!. It doesn’t matter massively what you get, some people who are in the the ‘Top 20′ I’m sure don’t get the massive numbers people thing they do. I remember being made up when I got over 20 visitors it meant someone was reading (other than my Mum!) and I could build on that and I still feel like that
When it comes to pimping out your blog, I can’t be arsed/have scary family on Facebook so don’t really want to have a networked blog on there. And I tend to only tweet a post once or twice on Twitter so I don’t annoy people.
As for RSS feed…I so stuffed mine up so I have on Feedburner 90 and according to my Google Reader I have 91 but they are both different feeds (seriously never mess with that crap!) so I have no idea really.
But for the same time period as you I had
* 3,771
Absolute Unique Visitors
* 7,081
Page Views
* 1.49
Average Page Views
* 00:01:04
Time on Site
* 78.97%
Bounce Rate
* 72.71%
New Visits
The bounce rate sucks because I had a post about the National Trust free day out, which I SEO’d better than they did, so they all bounced off asap!
I disagree with you to an extent, Dan. I know – freaky, isn’t it??
Providing it’s used within reason, Twitter is a fantastic way of attracting new readers to a blog – a really good post might get RT’d 20 times and you’ve reached 5,000 potential readers within the space of 10 minutes. I’ll often get 300+ clicks on a Twitter link to a blog post in a day, and I like to think if it’s a good post, some of those people will become new subscribers. Yes, it needs to be done in balance and one hopes to remain a good Twitter “citizen” but it’s not hard work and if your network is relevant, one would also hope your Twitter friends are interested in your blog.
I disagree (hurrah!)
If I’m following you on twitter I’m following your bog in google reader. I use twitter for conversations between friends, not as a blog feed reader.
I do occasionally follow a twitter link to a blog post. But no blog post is worth hourly retweets. Three tiems is enough – morning, afternoon and evening. After that – just let it go.
I have unfollowed quite a few people because their constant “I’ve posted!” tweets have driven me bananas. I saw it the bloody first time! I’m not the only one to think this, I’ve had a conversation with a number of people who think the same thing.
To be honest I even unfollow a few people temporarily when there are big “blogging events” going on as I get sick of reading their retweets about other’s retweets.
Twitter, for me, isn’t a marketing opportunity and it’s use as such (wait for it, wait for it) is sadly indicative of commercial sensibilities encroaching on the blogging world.
I’d write a blog post about this, but I’m getting bored with hearing myself whine on about this sort of stuff
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What’s usually interesting is what people have been searching for when they end up on a blog…. but, Lapland porn… is there really such a thing?!
I post mine weekly! I find the search terms greatly entertaining myself.
http://www.meandmysexyreindeer.com
I’d say that I tend to comment less on blogs that get loads of comments already (despite knowing what their stats are). I know it’s strange, but maybe it’s that small town, big fish mentality. I figure that the people who don’t get a lot of comments are more likely to appreciate what I have to say. Strange huh? But I definitely like the reciprocity of the smaller blogs (not that that stops me from reading yours at all!). Stats are a weird thing!
I think people keep their stats secret because, as you suggested, they might fear failure. There is also the idea that you might be thought of as boasting, which doesn’t go down well. Maybe it’s a bit like not discussing one’s salary – we were always told it wasn’t the ‘done’ thing to discuss that. I don’t think sharing your stats should make anyone decide they won’t follow/read you any more.