photo credit: Jef Poskanzer

Gauge Check

Running a blog can be quite an intimidating task for someone that has never done it before. It is easy to become wrapped up in the details and trying to pay attention to every little thing. It’s kind of like the cockpit of an airplane, you have literally hundreds of gauges that you could pay attention to, in fact you have so many gauges you could be so busy looking at the gauges that you lose site of your destination.

Chances are out of ALL of those gauges, as long as a few of them are ok and where they should be, then the rest will be too. Airspeed, altitude, fuel level, oil pressure; as long as these MAIN gauges are ok then chances are you’re in good shape overall. You can glance at some of the other ones occasionally but it isn’t necessary to look at them every day.

Blogging Stats

Your blogging stats are the same way as this airplane example. You could get lost in all of the minutia if you let yourself. Their are so many blog rankings, and “whats my blog worth” sites, pagerank, Alexa, Uniques, PageViews, Bounce Rate, Referral links etc that you could spend all day analyzing your stats.

This is time you could and should be spending either writing new content or promoting the content you have already written. That is the real deal. If you keep your eye on the important gauges, and they are in good shape, then that will allow you the peace of mind that all those other little issues are ok too.

I am not advocating that you NOT check your other stats, just to set aside time maybe once a month to do a cavity search. You can get by most of the time just by sticking out your tongue and saying ahhhh.

My Stats are A-OK

I am a self admitted stat junkie, but I have sworn to reform. I only check a couple of stats daily and the rest can wait til either the weekend or the end of the month. It’s been a while since I have done an Alexa update so I thought it was time both for my benefit and that of anyone considering advertising on my blog.

PageRank – The last update that I did was on 2/22/08 which was just under a month ago. I am disappointed that my PR didn’t pick up any on the latest update but one of my PR5 backlinks had his PR reduced to zero so I lost some major juice there. I am hoping to move to a PR4 on the next update at least. This is not a stat I purposefully check but it’s in my toolbar so it’s easy to do.

Alexa – My Alexa as you can see is solidly under 100k now. I predicted this would happen shortly a few Alexa updates ago. My site is still very new so my 3 month average includes that first month when I was just starting out. I predict I will settle in around the 50k range for a while once I am 6 months old.

Technorati is improving daily. As you can see that was not in very good shape just 3 updates ago coming in at 180k. I can tell that the quality of my writing is improving by the number of links I have coming in and my Technorati reflects that. This is probably the stat I am the most proud of right now.

Traffic is not a stat that I track on my updates as it changes so frequently. I was really inconsistent a month or so ago. I would have 500 one day and then 50 the next. I have settled in at a nice, dependable 4-500 visits per day. A little more on some days and a little less on others.

RSS Subscribers was not something I admitted at first because I had so few. I was embarassed to post my Feed count but I have made a fair amount of gains in that department as well and I am right around the 200 number. This is low compared to the big boys but I haven’t done hardly anything to promote my feed but that will change shortly.

Why Stats Are Important

I pay a lot of attention to the stats above because they are the ones that advertisers will use to determine whether or not you are an attractive blog to spend money advertising on. If you have the Alexa, traffic and RSS subscribers that would make the ad cost a good investment then they will spend money with you.

My intention has always been to monetize this site primarily via private ad sales so you can see why staying on top of my stats is important to me.  I am patient and happy with the progress, so far things are going almost exactly as planned.

So that’s my stat check, looks like my Main gauges are in good shape so I am sure the rest of my stats are looking pretty good as well.

How about your stat check? Are you flying straight and level and on your flight plan?