Three Sticks — Personal Development for Christians

The success of your blog or website is determined entirely by your readership. If visitors come to your site and leave immediately or leave after reading one article you’ve lost the opportunity to expand your regular readership, increase the influence of your message and earn more revenue. The goal of almost every blog is to develop a loyal following of visitors who read and stay on the site everyday.

Of course if you want to be successful blogging, you need to understand why you want to build a loyal following of visitors. If it is simply to make money, you may find that this is insufficient motivation to keep you focused on doing the hard work that build a loyal readership and consequently a successful blog. Steve Pavlina’s article How Selfish Are You? is a good introduction to begin defining why you engage in some of your activities.

Because bloggers and webmasters look at their sites all of the time they are often unable to identify the necessary tweaks and changes that would make their site easier to use by an unfamiliar audience. Often times friends and family want to sugarcoat their evaluations making it especially difficult to get an objective assessments.

The only way to know objectively how well you site is doing it to look at the numbers. In web parlance the numbers are located in your web servers logs. The logs of most web servers capture all types of information about your visitors such as the type of operating system used, pages clicked on, pages where they left to go to another site. Until recently it’s been beyond the average bloggers ability to review logs on a regular basis. Here are some free tools that will help you understand how you’re visitors use your site.

1. Your hosting Provider’s Control Panel – Let’s start at home first. Your hosting provider probably offers a nice and easy control panel such as CPanel, to manage your slice of the web server where your blog resides. Often the control panel listens on another port like www.yourblog.com:2050. Most control panels include a statistics or logging section that include powerful tools to build graphical reports about your blogs activity. These tools are typically updated once a day. That means that once a day the logs are read by the tool and a new report is generated. Most of these tools are open source, which is why your provider can afford to offer them with your low priced hosting package. For example, my provider offers Webalizer and Awstats. I review each daily. Often their numbers do not exactly match because some of the information presented is interpreted, meaning that 2 pieces of data are analyzed together to come to a conclusion and the 2 tools do not agree on the conclusion. However, together I get a pretty good idea of how my site is performing.
2. Google Analytics - Google offers an amazing alternative to your providers offering. Google Analytics is a comprehensive reporting and analysis tool that helps you understand how your visitors interact with your blog and what parts of the blog are generating revenue for you. It will allow you to establish monetary goals for different parts of your blog. I believe you have to be enrolled in Google Adsense to use the conversion tools to help you monetize your blog. Because of the interactive nature of the site (it uses AJAX) to drive the interface you are able to generate ad-hoc queries which is something not offered in versions of tools offered by most providers. I’m still learning more about the reporting power offered by Google Analytics, but I recommend that anyone with a blog or website check it out.
3. Feedburner – Feedburner makes the list because it offers you the ability to determine the number of visitors hitting or subscribing to you feed in a given day. This is extremely useful in determining the number of regular visitors you have to your site. It takes a relatively large amount of effort for someone to view a site and subscribe to an RSS feed. Of course with technologies like Live Bookmarks in Firefox and IE7 it’s a lot easier. Fortunately, Feedburner tracks those as well.
4. Alexa – Alexa provides traffic ranking for your site. The hitch here is that your blog has to rank in the top 100,000 of sites for it to be included. I’m not quite there yet according to Technorati, Three Sticks currently is in the top 340,000 of sites. That’s not bad considering it was in the top 1.7 million of sites just 3 weeks prior to me writing this article.
5. URLTrends – URLTrends is an aggregator of different site statistics from Google, Yahoo and others. It is useful for understanding how your blog ranks against others.

If you’re wondering how these tools help you improve your blog, here is a practical example. This morning I used the site overlay feature in Google Analytics to determine the effectiveness in of my navigation. I quickly realized that a large number of visitors come to the front page and click on the “Empower, Teaching, Healing” title expecting to go to the blog. Instead it sends you back to the front page. It was part of the template that I downloaded and it didn’t occur to me to change it because I always click on the blog link at the upper navigation. Because of my familiarity with the blog I’m immune to it’s weaknesses.

Unfortunately when visitors run into navigation they do not understand they leave, because with all the choices out there why bother with a site that’s hard to use. Needless to say, I’ve fixed that navigation problem. This is all part of the process of learning and understanding your growing readership and tweaking your blog to address their needs.

Reviewing your logs regularly gives you the opportunity to see your blog through the eyes of your readers. You are effectively a product manager who’s product is the message that is delivered through your blog. If your customers do not like your delivery they won’t receive your message. Having readers who receive your message is the definition of success.

And, if you are a number cruncher, Google Analytics and Feedster allow you to download your data in a .csv file so that you can import it into your favorite spreadsheet (ex. Open Office, Excel, Google Spreadsheet etc).

I’m sure I’ve missed some tools, if there is something that you think should be on the list but isn’t please leave a comment or send me an email.

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