Blogging Tips: Blog Statistics Are Your Friend!

I've been writing a series on blogging tips lately. These include How to Write an Amazing Blog Post, How to Promote Your Blog using Facebook, and How to Increase Your Blog Traffic Using Twitter. This one might be more... divisive. It's about statistics, and how they can help you with your blog.

When I first started blogging, the advice I got from most people was: don't look at your stats. Don't read the stats. Don't worry about the stats. Stats are meaningless. 

I'm a bit of a geek, though; I like stats. I like graphs and analysing data and knowing what's going on. So I would carry on checking the stats on my blog, feeling like I was breaking the rules somehow. 

Then I spoke to Mark, who blogs at Best Dad I Can Be (and has written a rather funny book). He was the first person to say to me that, if you want your blog to do well, you need to pay attention to the stats.

If you're just blogging for fun, and you're not at all interested in how to get more readers or followers or improve your Tots 100 ranking or your Klout score or whatever else, then fine. Stop reading this post. It's not for you.

If you are interested in how statistics can help you, read on.

• Install Google Analytics on your blog. You can use it to see useful things like how many unique visitors you have each day/week/month. You can compare this week with last week, and see loads of other things besides.

• Look at how people are finding you. Which websites are your main sources of traffic? What words to people search on Google to get to your blog?

• Use your stats to see whether the links you post on Facebook or Twitter are bringing you any more traffic. Did that linky post you linked up with on a whim the other day actually bring you more traffic than all that Tweeting?

• Use Google Analytics to see your traffic sources, and which sites have the highest percentage of new visitors. It's important here to take note of the average time spent on the blog though; quite often you'll get a high percentage of new visitors from sites like Stumbleupon, but the nature of the site means that people may only spend a few seconds there.

• Which are your most popular posts? Look at what's different about these, and why they might be more popular - do they have more useful information, more personal content, more controversial arguments?

• If you have a Facebook page, look at the Insights at the top of the page to see which posts had the most interaction. Do posts made at a particular time of day get more interaction? Is it photos? Links to other pages? Random "I am picking my nose" TMI posts? Try and use this information to better time when and how you posts links to your blog.

• You can use sites like bit.ly to shorten your links - but they will also count how many times that link is clicked on. This can be useful if, for example, you use these links for specific  posts only (at a certain time of day or in a certain place) - you can track exactly how much effect these actions are having.

• I find it useful to keep my own spreadsheet of how many unique visitors I have, and the average visit duration each month. This can show you at a glance whether what you're doing to promote your blog is paying off.

• I also keep track of the number of visitors my blog has had in the last rolling month. As a rule you want this number to go up, or at least stay the same - if it starts to go down then you know you need to have a look at where you are losing readers.

So there is my list of ways you can use statistics to help with your blogging. Do you agree with these? Do you have any to add? Please do share your thoughts in the comments.

Hooray for the Weekend?

A while back, I was talking to a friend whose wife had recently died. He said he didn't like to walk into town on his own, because he felt that everyone was staring at him.

I told him that was silly, that nobody bats an eyelid at a single man walking through town alone.

And then I stopped and thought...

I have two days off in the week, and until I returned to work I was free every day. On week days I will happily bundle S into the buggy and wander off. We'll go to the park, go to town, do some shopping, maybe go to another park, for a walk... whatever takes our fancy.

On the weekends though, I'm convinced the fact I'm a single mother sticks out a mile, and that everyone is looking at me, alone with my child, and silently judging me. I know this is ridiculous; I know nobody really notices one way or the other. But it still bothers me.

This is what our weekends usually look like.

I dislike weekends, because those are the days when the dads are home from work, and people do things as a family. The parks are filled with dads pushing their kids on the swings, watching them go down the slides, or pushing them in pushchairs. Town is filled with families walking round the shops. Families in restaurants, families on buses, families in cars at traffic lights. 

To me, it notices that I am still on my own on the weekends. Nobody comes home to spend the weekend with us.

On weekends, the loneliness notices more. People go out on a Friday or Saturday night; I have nobody to take me out, no reason to get a babysitter. 

The friends I would normally visit or go to the park with are busy with their husbands or boyfriends, doing family things on the weekends. I don't want to bother them by asking if they want to do something with us, and make them feel guilty for saying no. Or worse, make them feel so guilty they say yes.

In the week, I'm too busy clearing up after yesterday and preparing for tomorrow to notice that I have a 4pm curfew which is rarely broken. On the weekends though, it notices. And it's depressing.

On a Friday evening, the weekend stretches ahead of me as two days where it's entirely likely the only other adults I will speak to will be shop assistants.

Who Would Have Thought...

When I was in the middle of having my breakdown, I went to the beach several times. I think I thought the sun, sea and sand would make me feel happy and at peace, but it never really did.

Every time I went, I would look up at the balloon that goes up from the Gardens, and think, "you could just get in that, wait for it to go up, and jump..."

One time I went as far as joining the queue, but I didn't have enough cash on me.

The next time I was there, I was with a friend. I told her about my plan with the balloon. She looked at it and said, "you can't jump off that; there's a cage all the way round to keep people in!"

Fast forward three years. 

Today I went to the beach with S and two of my sisters. It was S's first trip to the beach, and I kind of expected her to not really enjoy it. Imagine my surprise when I took her down to the sea for a paddle, and she just kept on walking. I lifted her over the waves as they came, but I missed a few and they got her full in the face! No tears though - she just giggled and kept on kicking her legs and jibbering away to herself. 

In the end, I walked up to Primark to buy a cheap bikini so that I could take S into the sea properly. I left her with my sisters (with a list of instructions as long as both their arms), and set off up to the shops. That involved walking through the gardens for the first time since that time three years ago.

As I walked past the balloon, I looked up and thought, imagine if I'd done it.

My life now is far from easy. I'm constantly behind on my studying, the housework, blog posts, emails, Twitter. S is not sleeping brilliantly, I'm constantly knackered, am too tired and short of time to buy and prepare proper food for myself. But I'm the happiest, most contented I've ever been in my life. Instead of going to the beach in a vague attempt to pull myself out of the pit of despair, I was there to enjoy the sea and the sand with my beautiful daughter, who enjoyed the whole experience a lot more than any of us expected.

As I passed the balloon, I texted my friend saying, "hey, remember that time you told me I couldn't jump out of the balloon..." Her response? 

Who would have thought you'd be where you are now?

Certainly not me.