Bloggers, Do the Analysis First

Where my readers are
Nov 19–23, 2014

I know now that I got the sequence backwards. Ironically, when I was looking into blogging with the hope of monetizing my writing that way,[1] nothing I read told me what I’m about to say, that you should start the analysis early. I got the sequence wrong, finally adding the analytics to the blog.

Blogger provides some analytics, but (as I’ve later learned), their hit counts includes every time your page gets accessed, even when there’s no human on the other end. I want my stuff to be read, and let’s face it, a web spider indexing my site isn’t actually reading anything.[2]

There, on the AdSense page was the link suggesting that I integrate my site with Google Analytics. Note to new bloggers: Sign up for Google Analytics on day 1. Because I demurred for so long, I have tracking data only from November 19, 2014 (despite that this blog launched on May 1, 2014). Just from those few days, I see that some fairly old posts are still getting traffic, which is good to know. One worry I had was that once posts were written, they would be quickly forgotten and no one would visit them again. But in these last five days, I see that people have visited pages written in every month of this blog’s existence.[3]

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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Inside AdSense

Look at those numbers!
You may need a magnifying glass.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of blogs about blogging, which when described that way seems even more navel gazing than this one. Actually, they’re blog posts on monetizing your blog content, and they probably get more traffic than I do. (I admit it, when I realized that my major themes were going to be constructed languages, gay rights, and cooking, I wasn’t assuming that I’d get massive amounts of traffic.[1]) I have seen my traffic slowly grow over the last six months, although recently it took a big tumble that had me wondering just what was going wrong.

Let me digress for a moment (my blog, I get to, though I’d never know if you skipped to the next paragraph) and discuss the State of the Blog at about six months. This is my 353rd post and this is the 201st day after I started the blog,[2] working out to about one-and-three-quarter posts per day. I have been getting approximately two thousand hits to my blog each month, and as I noted in the previous paragraph, that has been slowly growing.

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!