Sail the 7 C’s to Better Blogging-How-to Look at Your Traffic

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Sail the 7 C’s to Better Blogging – How-To Look at Your Traffic

 

Blogging – C #6 – Check and Adjust – Actually look at what is going on.

Today’s post is on JetPack Stats.  Tomorrow we’ll look at Google Analytics

 In an earlier post, “Sail the 7 Cs of Blogging”, I gave an overview of seven different aspects of blogging.

HOW-TO – Today we take a quick look at our real Traffic – Something YOU SHOULD DO!

This post is part of a series of seven posts (it started as four and kinda grew :) ).  Here we are taking a look at where we ARE so we can see if we IMPROVE.

Better Blogging Requires that you Check and Adjust - Look at your traffic

Better Blogging Requires that you Check and Adjust

Overview of the Series

  • C#1 – Find your CORE (Your Niche and Your USP)
  • C#2- Blog Consistently    – widely recognized as THE most important element.
  • C#3- Be Congruent
  • C#4 – Content is King
  • C#5 – Have at least one Call to Action
  • C#6 – Check and Adjust – Actually look at what is going on.  That is what this post is about.
  • C#7 – Connect with your Audience – see the next paragraph

Connecting with your Audience – Creating blog traffic has four distinct phases –

  1. Things you do before you start posting in your blog – covered in a post about Phase 1,
  2. Things you do while you are writing a post (SEO and HOC) – covered in a post about Phase 2,
  3. Things you do after you write a post and press Publish  Blog Traffic After Publish 1,  What The Expert Bloggers Do,  Notes From the Research   and My Original Traffic System.
  4. Check and And Adjust – Look at what is actually happening to your traffic and adjust your thinking.  I posted at look at my starting traffic a while back.  This is an example of a way to look at your traffic.

Caveat – there are lots of opinions and lots of research on this topic.  I’m giving you the best that I know.  Parts of it will probably be out of date before it is even published.

 This is going to a be what is usually called a Quick and Dirty – I’m going to use my current blog as an example and I’m NOT going to go deep.

Look At Your Traffic with JetPack – Site Stats

Site Stats in the JetPack Menu

Site Stats in the JetPack Menu

JetPack is a multi-faceted plugin developed by WordPress.com (the free, but limited, WordPress blog site).   The open source WordPress developers (i.e. the folks at WordPress.org) felt that it was worthy and now include it in every new installation of WordPress.   I’ve heard mixed reviews, but I like it and use it.  I’m only going to look at the Site Stats.JetPack is almost at the top of your side menu.  When you hover your mouse over it or click on it you will see Site Stats.  All you have to do is click on this menu option to look at your traffic.

 

A Quick Loot at Your Traffic

Once you click on the menu option, it processes for a few seconds and then brings up a screen that looks like this.   As you hover the mouse over the bars a small window will appear showing you the name of the post you published that day and same basic statistics.   I’m going to start with a very slow day.

 

JetPack - Shows you the Current Period

JetPack – Shows you the Current Period

 Details for a Slow Day – (The WHY Behind My Drive to CREATE TRAFFIC!)

 When you click on the vertical bar that is highlighted in yellow you get more detailed information about that day.   Here we see that we had two hits from Google (looking for “Hale Pringle” and two from Facebook.   The Home Page got most of the views and the About Hale page did get a view.

JetPack - Slow Day Details

JetPack – Slow Day Details

 

 Look at a Busy Day

A month later, I’ve been working on generating traffic and the results show that.

JetPack - Busy Day

JetPack – Busy Day

You may not be able to see it, but there are 256 visits compared with the 12 visits from before.

Busy Day Details

The details give a different story.  The two pages with no titles are the landing pages for PPC ads I was running in Facebook.  They account for 146 of the 256 views.   That still means a rise in traffic from 12 views to 110, close to 10 times the traffic.   The post that was published that day got the most views followed by the Home Page.

NOTE About the HOME PAGE VIEWS

I expect my Home Page views to go DOWN some.   I was researching this and discovered something that should have been obvious, but wasn’t.  I wrote a post on Effective Commenting. When I comment on other’s blogs there are two fields that become a link to my website.  The first is NAME and I was using “Hale”, the is the “anchor text” for the link.  It is what people see and click on.  Anchor text is recorded by Google.  I am using my full name “Hale Pringle” now.  That gives another instance where my brand is seen by people AND counted by Google.   The second field was WEBSITE.  I had been leaving my blog URL http://HalePringle.com  – that is my HOME page.   Now, except for sites using a plugin called CommentLuv, I am leaving a link to my current post.  Since Google indexes and ranks PAGES, not websites, I want some links to each post I write.  (CommentLuv automatically gives you a link to one of your posts.  It usually gives you 10 posts to choose from.)

 

JetPack - Busy Day Details

JetPack – Busy Day DetailsO

On the left side of this page you can see that the VAST MAJORITY of my traffic came from Facebook – only 7 came from Google Searches

Busy Day – More Details

JetPack - Busy Day Details 2

JetPack – Busy Day More More Details

Here we can see that 4 out of the 5 searches were for my name.

Look At Your Traffic – Lessons Learned

  1. At this point in time, SEO effort is mostly wasted.  Visitors are NOT finding my blog through organic search. 
    In many ways, I’m not surprised.  While I make sure every page is SEO optimized for a key word, I am not tightly focused on trying to rank a particular page at the top of Google.
  2. My HOME Page is critical.  More people see it than any other page over time.
  3. Facebook is my primary source.
  4. Advertising throws the simple looks at my traffic off.

Notes about using Site Stats to Look at Your Traffic

It is easy to look at your traffic since it is right there when you go to your blog.  

If you are advertising, you need to click on the details to get a better look at your traffic and get a better feel for what is happening.

It does not have a way to summarize a week or a month.  It generates a very pretty Year End Report, but other than that is only provides daily snapshots.

I think you can see – You SHOULD Look At Your Traffic

 

Until next time, you have a Great Day!

Dr Hale

 

 

↓ ↓ If this post gave you some ideas – Go ahead & comment below.  ↓ ↓

 

Hale Pringle

Hale Pringle Ed. D.

 

Hale Pringle – Hale Yes!

Skype hale.pringle

Email: HaleYes@HalePringle.com

 

P.S. If you are working to move your business online and it all seems overwhelming, I can help!  Take a look at http://HalePringle.com, or sign up for the free coaching call. You can email me or give me a Skype call. I’ll give you the benefit of my years of experience and many thousands of dollars in training and searching the rabbit hole called Internet Marketing and Network Marketing. I can help you with Lead Generation, the feeling of overwhelm, blogging, and even career change. Add that to the finest mentoring on the Internet (Ann Sieg’s Team and Inner Circle) and you have a Winner!

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About Hale Pringle

Dr. Hale is an Internet Entrepreneur and Network
Marketing expert. His greatest pleasure is
helping people and he does just that, drawing
upon the immense resources that he has gathered
over the years in his unquenchable thirst for
knowledge.

Dr. Hale lives in beautiful, sunny Florida with
his wife, two dogs and a cat. His four children
are grown and are scattered around the state.

An eternal optimist you will hear him say
regularly: “Is this a Great Day?” The answer is
always, “Hale Yes!”

If you need help with your online marketing or a
network marketing opportunity Dr. Hale is the go
to man. “Hale Yes!”

Comments

  1. Joy! Thanks! I didnt’ know that about the website link. Now I’ll be putting blog behind that link.

    I also have to pick who I am to comment. I have a google id and wordpress.com id. I’d like to use my wordpress.org id. Is there away to do that? It never seems to be a choice.
    Diana

  2. Wanted to let you know when I try to tweet this, it comes up with the title name and instead of a url it says invalid log in name.
    Diana
    Diana Lesire Brandmeyer recently posted..Parenthood and AdoptionMy Profile

    • I’ll go check it as soon as I finish answering comments. I’ve been meaning to check that stuff for a while now. Thanks for the nudge.

      Regards,
      Dr. Hale

  3. Hey Hale, Great information here on JetPack. Getting your stats is vital to your website successs. You show proof right here because you know what to do to improve. Thanks for sharing!
    sherman smith recently posted..Why You Don’t Have To Prove That Your Business Is The Only, Right SolutionMy Profile

  4. Is there a way to get JetPack if we don’t have it already? Thanks, Dr. Hale.
    Amy Hagerup recently posted..A 7 Step System for Recording WebinarsMy Profile

  5. Arch McNab says

    Really good post about traffic analysis. We cannot control what we do not measure. I really enjoyed your examples, they clearly illustrate that points that you are making. Thank you for taking the time to explain exactly what is going on and what id causing the changes in traffic.

    • Thanks for the complements Arch. Traffic analysis fascinates me and it doesn’t have to be that hard.

      Thanks again,
      Dr. Hale

  6. It’s an remarkable article for all the internet viewers; they will
    obtain benefit from it I am sure.
    Polecanych hydraulik sopot recently posted..Polecanych hydraulik sopotMy Profile

Trackbacks

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  3. […] C Number 6: CHECK (and adjust) (Here is a post in this series about Check and Adjust Your Blog) […]

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