My Blog is Up, What Now: Knowing Your Traffic
So you got your blog up and wondering what’s the next step? Well you should pay attention to this series of articles with expert advice on how to tune your blog into an cash machine. I’ll let you in on a bunch of tips and tricks with Wordpress that will make your days more simple when blogging.
First step is knowing your traffic.
If there is something I have learned from my 8 years in online marketing it is to know your traffic. We are not talking about a simple website counter telling you how many visits you got today, we need to know much more. The way I see it there is three ways to look at the traffic and they’re all important.
Incoming traffic, when the traffic comes to your website.
You want to know where your traffic came from. Who sent it to you? Was it from one of your blogroll friends, a complete new site or was it from a search engine? If it was from a friend of your blogroll, be sure to link to one of their articles in your upcoming blog post. That way you give back a favor. If it was from a new blog/website, be sure to visit that site and read what they wrote about you. If you like the blog maybe there can be a link exchange for your blogroll. And if it was a search engine, good for you, free traffic. Be sure to look up what they searched for and try to write even more posts about that subject.
It’s also fun to know what part of the world they came from. That why you know how to target your ads when dealing with advertisers. (covered later)
You want to know what kind of browsers your visitors are using so that you can make your site better viewable to the browser that is mostly used. Are they on Mac or PC? It’s good to know if you are making a downloadable file and new just figure out that you for some reason have 90% mac users on your site, it could be smart to convert the file to be more Mac usable.
On site traffic, what the visitors do on your site.
After the traffic has arrived your site you want to know what they are doing on your site. What pages are they reading and which posts are most popular. Are they commenting on your site or just reading and leaving?
There is a lot to learn from how the readers move around your site. Are they there to just read the headlines or are they actually clicking your read more buttons? The more they click around the better quality of traffic they are.
Outgoing traffic, where do they go?
The last piece of the puzzle is where the visitors click before they leave. A visitor leaving your site is not a bad thing at most cases as long as you know the reason and in many cases the reason is good.
I don’t want to go in really deep and boring with this but you as long as your visitor left by clicking either your friends in the blogroll or and advertisement you win. You sent either your sponsor traffic and could get paid or you sent your friends traffic, so if they track it, and they should, they will send it back.
If your visitors leave by just closing the browser or your link is configured so that they close your site when clicking on a link in your blog post, then you loose. Your traffic is lost and will not come back without an effort. And you want to make it easy for your visitor to stay and feel welcome.
So how do you monitorize this?
There is two good ways to monitorize this on your Wordpress blog.
One of the ways have been mentioned on Alex Jeffreys coaching program calls and that is Google Analytics. You simply sign up for an account and you get a piece of code that you need to put in your design template.I must admit that even I have problems figuring out all of the numbers in Google Analytics. It can be a little to much to handle when you are new to the whole thing. Even though you should install it, I find it easier to handle when I have something else to compare it with.
The second way to monitorize your Wordpress blog traffic is to install a Plugin for Wordpress called StatPress. This little piece of code gives you a very good overview of the first two important traffic issues. It doesn’t not show you where the traffic goes.
So that’s my tips for knowing your traffic, use both Google Analytics and StatPress and compare the results. They will not be alike and one of them is not showing more correct then the other in my view. But you will get an idea on the three ways you should know your traffic and that is way better then saying “Hi I just got 200 visits on my blog this week, and I don’t know where they came from”. Well now you know because you should.
- Register for Google Analytics here
- Download StatPress for Wordpress here
Found this post useful or have any questions? Please leve a comment and I will point you in the right direction.
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Excellent article on knowing your traffic stats Thomas.
It is important to know your stats because roughly 80% of your traffic will be generated through only 20% of your efforts. It is important to know which methods are producing the quality targeted traffic so you can concentrate your efforts in these areas.
You can also capture some of your exit traffic by installing an exit popup, I find these far less annoying than regular popups, what’s your opinion on these?
Great looking blog by the way.
All the best,
Martin
Hi Martin!
That is so true. The 80/20 rule also applies here.
About the capturing of exit traffic, I would rater use a popunder than an exit popup. This will maybe not capture the visitors eyes at once when leaving, but when closing the main window your popunder will still be viewable and will catch more visitors attention then an popup just when you leave.
Hi Thomas
Great article.
I just popped over here ater I read your comment on Garry’s bllog about your wierd Norwegian accent. In the days when I ran an IT department my best projet manager was Norwegian. She knocked the socks off all the English I had on board and I loved her accent, it sounded very educated. Just had to curb her comments about the Swedish !!!
So I would say such an accent is a bonus not a handicap. Make that video.
Kath
This phoro is not me but it was on my machine. How did it get in here ?
Hi Kath!
Thanks for the comments about the article. I hope to write more of those in the near future.
So you thin having a funny accent is a bonus? Hmm.. never thought about it that way. I guess when a guy with a funny accent like me can get a video together everybody can. hehe. Thanks for the inspiration. I’ll start working on that.
About the pic on your comment. Doesn’t that happen on every site you comment on? There is a site called http://www.gravatar.com/ where you sign up for an account and add a picture. So on every wordpress blog you comment on that offers this, the picture you registered with your email address will turn up next to your comment.
Hope that makes sense and that you figure out about the picture. (That looks very good if you ask me, sure that isn’t you?)
Hi,
My name is Al Bushert and I am also one of Alex Jeffrey’s students.
I am new to this and am trying to catch up with everyone.
Please check out my blog at http://www.marketingbyal.com
I would appreciate any and all comments.
Please add me to your blogroll.
Thanks for all.
Al
Hi Al!
I’m glad you are getting your blog started. Good Job Al, it’s the beginning of something great. Keep on working hard with your blog and your list and you will succeed. There is so many people in this community to help you out so you are in good hands and will not be left behind.
And you are added to my blogroll, please link me back :)
Hekko agaiin
I have updated my gravatar image. That will teach me to mess around with things and forget what I’ve done. Hope the new image shows up now.
I have added you to my blogroll can you do the same please ?
Obviously hekko means hello !
hehe.. that’s good Kath!
You just need to remember using the same email address that you signed up for under http://gravatar.com/ for every post.
Hmm. And I need to figure out why my comments always comes in bold and gray backgrounds. It’s probably because I’m the blogs owner. But still I think it’s a bit to much.
but both the old and the new have the same email adress because I just updated it and obviously I didn’t log out between the last 2 messages. Rats. Lets see this time
so far so good.
AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH what is going on ! Please delete the comments with the wrond picture now I’m really frustrated
OK I’ve deleted all the old blogs so I suspect this wont have a picture at all
Looks like it’s just you know.. Just your own picture everywhere. Looks good :)
I’m glad we figured that out Kath :)
Hi Thomas and fellow students,
Love your blog, Thomas. Great work! Please add me to your blogroll. I’ll do the same.
LISTEN, EVERYONE PAY ATTENTION! I have a terrific Christmas present for all of you. Terrific is an understatement. This will most definitely be the greatest Christmas present you will recieve this year! I guarantee it. It’s worth $4,000! Yes, not a typo.
Everyone get over to my blog ASAP at http://www.marklucianoonline.com and read the posts from Dec.16th and Dec.18th. Don’t wait even one second or you will miss this. It isn’t going to be there for long, and I want all of my fellow students to get this NOW!
Tell all of our fellow students about this, but nobody else please. If you wait you’ll be very angry when you see what you missed out on.
Hi Thomas
Thanks for leaving your address over at Fortunate 500.
I’m glad you accepted my friend invitation and also that I came over
to your blog. You have some very useful information.
Clearly your 8 years in internet marketing haven’t been wasted.
Well done and Good Luck!
Jean
http://www.jeansmenopausalmoment.com/blog
Hi Thomas,
What an excellent article on understanding your web site/blog traffic. Your years of experience are paying off. I know who to turn to for answers and will subscribe so I can find you again easily.
Since you wrote such an outstanding article, have you submitted it anywhere else, like Hub pages or squidoo with links back to your blog? This is something that I think I’ll start doing.
Did you put google analytics in your ppp? Just curious.
See you soon,
Theresa
Hi Theresa!
Thanks for kind words, it means a lot to me.
About submitting my articles to Hub and Squidoo, I haven’t really taken those action steps. Maybe I should do that too. I tried to submit some articles to Articles directories but I didn’t get anyone approved. So I just took it for granted that my english grammar wasn’t good enough.
About google analytics. Yes I also put that in my PPP on http://www.12steplistbuilding.com It’s just great for analyzing the traffic that comes to that site too. Maybe even more important then the blog I guess. So do that if I haven’t gotten to it.
Hey Thomas
The subject of this post is so important. We need to track our traffic sources and what actions they perform once they reach us. We use Analytics, but I will definitely check out the plug in. Another solution (paid) is Adtrackz to track visitors.
To your success
JJ