One of the main aims for my blog, apart from being a place where I can collect information which for one reason or another is difficult to find otherwise, is that I wanted to play around and see what sorts of things attract readers.

In one of my first posts I talked about the blog of John Chow who is most famous for making enormous amounts of money from his blog on how to make enormous amounts of money on his blog telling people how he has made enormous amounts of money (http://www.haydnallbutt.com.au/2008/04/02/making-20-million-from-scratch/).  By way of up date on what I posted back in April last year, the latest John Chow Blog income update that I could find was October 2008 (http://www.johnchow.com/blog-income-report-october-2008/) in that month alone he made $34,350.93, which apparently was down $4000 from the previous month.  In this post he also mentioned how he had 218,396 visitors that same month which of course is an important factor in how he is able to monetize his blog so successfully.

My own readership is the barest fraction of sites like John Chow’s but it is interesting to look at what brings people to a blog and how to increases those numbers.

To start with I used Google Analytics to see how many unique visitors to my web site I had per month since it first opened for business.  These numbers are shown in the figure below:

Figure 1.  The number of unique visitors to my blog web site as measured by google analytics for the dates shown on the x axis.

As I said, the numbers are as yet very small.  One of the reasons for this is that I am not writing about any topic in particular so there is no specific, pre-defined audience that will tune in to these pages.  Another is that I have been quite irregular with my posts with often whole months going by without having made a post.  I have been trying to fix that in recent weeks and have increased the frequency.  The three posts in this month will be my most active month (yes that is still a very poor effort but at the same time, it can only get better!).   I started the blog as part of my 10 year plan for the AEReS project.  I am suppose to be teaching my self how to increase my readers.  To this end I have made it my goal for the year (2009) to triple my readership from what it was last year.  The highest number of unique visitors in any month were the 55 who found my site in March this year.  This means that by March next year I need to have 165 unique visitors.  Even 165 readers is a shamfully poor effort for two years worth of blogging so I am keen to absolutely smash that goal.  I will write a monthly up date on how the site stats are going.

Tools for analysing your visitors

Google Analytics is very helpful for finding out what has brought people to your web site.  If you haven’t installed it on your web pages and you don’t currently use anything else it is well worth a go.  I find the most helpful feature of it is the ability to see what search words brought people to your site.  Apart from showing which topics tend to be searched for more often it also shows you the sorts of words that people use to find your pages.  By tailoring the text on your pages to these sorts of words you will help readers find your pages.  In other words you will be engaging in “search engine optomisation”, a big buzz word in online marketing circles.

The other thing I find useful is which pages of my side are most often read and which hold people’s attention the longest.  This is important since it is obviously these pages that have information that people want, or that they found more interesting.  You can then let this information guide you in the creation of future posts.

Most popular pages on my site

On my site, by far the most visitors come for the information I have on the  replaceable rules in corporation law.  I know from when I was searching for information on it when I was registering my own company that it was strangely difficult to find any coherent information on this, so I decided to put together a post that fixed that.  As a result a large proportion of my visitors are for this post.

The other most popular post in terms of time spent on it, and the most landed on page is the one on how to assemble an infrared light source.  Strangely it is the first of the two posts on this, where I talk about why I needed an IR light source and what options I found were available rather than the second page where I actually describe how to put it together that is the most popular page.

What do I have coming up?

One of the reasons I was posting so infrequenly I found was that it takes some effort to come up with a good idea for a topic to post about.  Then, particularly if you put a lot of effort into the post, it can take quite a while to put the post together.  If you are busy with other things, it can therefore be a struggle to find the time to put into a post.  I found with my self that while I would not necessarily intend to avoid writing a post, I would find my self busy with other things, and so I would put it off, and before I knew it whole months had passed.

To help with this I have been making a note of ideas for blog entries as I have them so that I don’t forget any.  That was the first step.  The next is finding the time.  I find that lunch time for me is a good time to do quick things that you have been meaning to do like up date your web site, look up something you have been meaning to find out, or as in this case, write a blog entry.  I have made a word document where I make note of all my blog entry ideas and I now have that hung on my wall at work so when I sit down at my desk at lunch and wonder what I can write about, I have a whole list of things with out having to spend time trying to think something up.  This list is already working as this post was one of the items on that list.  I have already even made a note to post an update on how my readership numbers are going on the 28th of each month, so I even have future post topics as a result.  I think this should be very helpful in getting me to increase the frequency of my posts and to feed the content beast.