A blog is a great communication medium, so long as people visit and read your blog. Some people measure their popularity by the number of comments they receive, or by the number of subscribers they have. These figures can often be misleading. Any good blog metrics package will give you a much more refined look at your blog.
Comments and subscribers are not reliable indicators of popularity. When it comes to comments, you may have some fairly good content, however some content is just for reading, not all content draws comments. Bloggers are also notorious for not stopping and leaving comments.
Subscriptions are just as unreliable. These days up to 50% of your subscibers may just be scrapers looking to make use of your content. Of the other 50%, how many actually read your feed?
A good blog metrics package will tell a real story about your visitors. You can see how long they are staying, which pages (posts) are more popular and whcih pages they are landing and leaving by.
By reading this information, you can determine which pages or stories are more popular and so concentrate on producing more along those lines. You are also able to see what search terms they are using to find you. A little more refinement and you can use those terms to increase your reader numbers.
Blog metrics packages provide a lot of valuable information if you know how to read them. That information is useless if you don’t know what to do with the information. Find what others think you do well and concentrate on that.
