Am I the Only One Reading This Blog

November 2, 2009 by yelena
Filed under Building Better Blog, blog

Am I here alone? Does anyone bother reading this?

If you write a blog that doesn’t seem to be getting much action, you probably ask yourself these questions quite often. Do you care to find out the answer? If yes, then there are a couple of ways to figure out how many people read your writing.

Quick and Dirty – Google Reader – it’ll take just a few seconds to get the results, but they might be rather off. Open Google Reader and click on Browse for Stuff link, then on Search and enter your blog’s name or URL in the Search by Keyword field.

Exact Science – a combination of Feedburner and Google Analytics.

Feedburner – go to www.feedburner.com and login with your Google ID and password. First, you’ll need to burn your blog’s feed, if you haven’t done so already. Then give Feedburner 24 hours to do its magic. Log in the next day (or a few days later) and the first thing you’ll see is the number of subscribers for each of your feeds.

Google Analytics – analyze the number of visitors, absolute unique visitors, average time on site (longer time would likely mean more reading gets done) and bounce rate (higher bounce rates mean less reading or even skimming)

And now you know how many people regularly read your blog (subscribe to it) and some other stats. Frankly, my numbers are absolutely crushingly abysmal. At some point, just a couple of months ago, I had 15 subscribers. But somewhere along the way I lost all but one of them, between not posting regularly and not writing stuff that would be of interest to my readers. Oh, and I changed the blog’s URL and its RSS feed at some point in the last few months.

The lesson learned, of course, is to never let your blog go! It takes a lot of time and effort to win new followers. Another huge lesson is to do things right the first time with setting up the blog and the feed. But if that’s not possible, then at least be very careful about making drastic changes.

So now here I am writing this post knowing that it is eagerly anticipated by an audience of one. First of all, to my one and only subscriber, whoever you are, lots of love and a huge THANK YOU! Thank you for choosing to continue reading my posts even with all the changes and breaks in service.

Second, I will continue writing this blog and making it better. Isn’t it just a waste of time? Well, I don’t think so. And here’s why:

I enjoy brainstorming ideas for new posts and writing them (even though I have less and less time for this)
I remain very optimistic that not only will I be able to get back to my previous record of 15 subscribers, but will surpass it.
I work on my writing – as a virtual assistant specializing in content writing, I want to use this blog as a test ground not only for my ideas, but for post formats, topics, headlines, writing techniques, etc.
It wins me clients – interestingly, most of my clients either found me through my blog or made up their mind about using my services based on my blog posts. In other words, my blog is part of my portfolio and as such it’s been working very well.
It helps me grow my list – I might not have many subscribers (again, a big shout out and a THANK YOU to my lone ranger out there whoever you are). Yet my blog keeps popping up in searches for relevant keywords (how do I know? I check Google Analytics and yes, occasionally Google my keywords). People look for answers, come to my blog and download my info product.

All these reasons do keep me going. And now I feel pretty pumped up about the direction my business is taking and the niche I’m carving for myself based on the feedback I get from my blog (yes, blog statistics is a great feedback).

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