How To Make A Blog Part Fifteen: The Crucial Things To Monitor

There are certain tasks you’re going to have to do either daily or weekly to keep your blog attracting even more traffic!

These include

• Moderating/answering comments
• Building back links
• Producing content
• Monitoring and adjustment

In previous articles in the ‘how to build a blog’ series, we have already covered ‘building backlinks’ and ‘producing content’.

And moderating and answering comments is a given.

So let’s discuss ‘Monitoring and Adjusting’.

Monitoring and adjusting is extremely important.

Here are the things that I like to monitor:

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Ad Banners/Links

You need to know which affiliate product banners are bringing you the most revenue (or none at all).

The space that any advertising occupies on your blog is valuable real estate. If something isn’t performing well, change it for an ad that pays its rent!

ACTION POINT: Depending upon how much traffic your site gets, you may want to monitor such activity every one to three months.

By using the Max Banner Ads plugin, you can monitor the number of times your banner ads are clicked on.

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Google Analytics

If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your site…do it now.

Many themes allow you to enter the GA code directly or you can use Yoast’s Google Analytics plugin.

Once installed there are so many different statistics you can monitor including number of visits, time visitors have spent on your page and keyword terms visitors have used to find your site.

ACTION POINT: Install Google Analytics

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The Crucial Statistic

A crucial statistic is ‘Bounce Rate’. Google use it to monitor the ‘quality’ of your site and that goes towards your website page rank.

Bounce Rate is simply a measure of how many visitors visited your site and left after viewing only one page.

A 100% Bounce Rate would mean all your visitors are leaving after viewing just one page.

Any Bounce Rate below 70% is deemed to be very good.

As I say, Google use this as part of their ‘quality’ ranking…so it’s worth paying close attention to it.

If it’s high then something is wrong.

If a visitor has come to your site via a link that should lead her to an article on a specific subject then she may be leaving quickly because your article doesn’t look enticing, isn’t written or formatted well, or doesn’t contain the information for which she is searching.

If a visitor can’t find what she’s looking for then she will leave, so make sure your site is easily navigable.

Some ACTION POINTS you can take to reduce your Bounce Rate:

Use internal links from blog post to blog post – see my video on the free plugin that does this for you.

Use your sidebar areas to list your recent posts and popular posts.

Use a related posts plugin like LinkWithin or nRelate.

BIG TIP: Use Google Analytics to see which of your pages/posts get a 100% Bounce Rate. Then go back to that post and add some interlinking or even remove that post from your sitemap.

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How to Monitor over 50 Stats at Once!

Although we mentioned Google analytics above, it only analyzes things that are relevant to Google. As you get more experienced you’ll probably like to know how you’re doing with other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing.

And what about your Alexa and DMoz rankings?

And how many Twitter followers and Facebook fans do you have?

This can take quite some time going to each site, logging in and digging for the information.

Pro Blog Stats is a FREE WordPress plugin that gathers all of this information for you in under 6 seconds and delivers it directly to your WordPress dashboard!

You can see more details about Pro Blog Stats by clicking here: Pro Blog Stats

ACTION POINT: Download and install Pro Blog Stats

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Monitoring your Links

It’s extremely frustrating when you visit a site, find something you’re interested in, click on the link to find it’s broken.

If it’s a link to an e-book you’re selling for example you will also lose revenue as a visitor is unlikely to return.

Understandably if you have a blog that’s now stretching to hundreds of pages you don’t want to have to spend a day clicking on every link to make sure it works! The solution is using another free plug-in called Broken Link Checker which tells you immediately if you have a problem. It monitors links on all your posts, pages, comments, your blog roll if you have one and any custom fields. It will even let you know about any broken links by e-mail!

Remember if you delete any of your posts and you have internal links from other pages pointing to that post, they’re not going to work.

ACTION POINT: Install the Broken Link Checker Plugin

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What do you monitor to make your blog successful?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.         

In the next post on the series, “How to make a Blog” we shall cover the topic of “Getting Organized and Outsourcing”