Do you check your traffic stats very often on your blog? You should because you will definitely learn a lot about what readers are interested in, which topics got you the most traffic, and one very important statistic, how long after you posted about something did you get the most traffic for that post.
In other words, this post, Blog Posting for the Future, some people that visit this blog daily will see the post today or maybe tomorrow. But how many people will find this blog post a week from now, a month from now, or longer?
We all know about timeless posts like this one where it doesn’t matter when someone reads it. The information will still be valid. But how do we use statistics to guide our posting to be more effective?
Let’s say I post about “wordpess plugins” on the 1st of september. I post about “blog seo” on the 12th and “typepad tips” on the 24th.
After checking my stats 30 days later, I see the page with that post on it got 1000 unique hits. I see the typepad post got 500 and the blog seo post got 250.
Well I also know that my weekend traffic is higher than my week day traffic, so I look to see which posts were on the weekend and which posts were weekdays and add that into my analysis. But let’s say all 3 posts were the weekend.
Then I know that people will visit me more when I let them know about wordpress plugins. I know typepad is more interesting to my readers than blog seo, and so forth.
Of course you need to keep checking every month to be sure it isn’t a fluke, but by using your stats you are learning about what brings people to your blog. Using that, you can increase your traffic.
Now that is just part of it. How does that apply to the title of this blog post, Blog Posting for the Future?
Now you are tracking your stats every month to see what posts are getting the most hits, so you also need to see when each post is getting most of those hits. The same day? The next day? The same week? Are most of the hits to a blog post you made coming a month after you posted it?
Remember, we are talking about hits directly to the blog post page and not to the main page of your blog.
If you are getting a lot of hits to your posts a month after you made them, then you can blog for the future. You can post about things that will be relevant to users who find your blog post a month from today.
If you had something you wanted people to buy on November 22nd, say concert tickets through your affiliate program, then you are posting about it on september 2oth-23rd. You get the idea.
The bottom line is learn from your statistics. Let your users guide you to what topics they want you to write about. Of course comments do that also, but for every person who comments, you might have 100 people reading your blog. So don’t just go by comments alone. You’d be surprised at what your stats teach you.
