First steps to success – track your blog stats
Reproduced from the first ever newsletter I sent to my (few) early subscribers.
Thank you for signing up to receive this newsletter – as I grow my blog and discover new ways to monetize it, or earn money online, I will share it here rather than bamboozle the readers on my sewing blog!
So first I wanted to look at how well my blog is doing – it’s only small but we should be familiar with statistics from the start so we can monitor them and see how we grow, and what is and is not working.
You can use ZombieStat.com to quickly gather some important info. Enter your blog or website address and wait while it searches and analyses. Then you can find such things as:
- Your Alexa rank – how your website ranks compared to others. My Alexa rank is 1,286,000 (now 644,000 at Feb 2013) which I take to mean that 1.286 million websites out there are getting more visits than me.
- Google Page Rank – how highly does Google rank your page? On a scale of 0-10, I am a 1. This is a very important number because certain sponsored posts will only be available sites that page rank 3 or higher for example.
- Traffic numbers – number of visitors and pageviews – I don’t know how they work these out, but it must be some kind of average. Better to gather your own data. We will talk about analytics and especially Google in a future newletter.
- How much is my website worth? They will give you an estimated value based on your traffic and your income. Interesting to look up data on some of your favorite sites too. My worth is shown as $480 (now $960 at Feb 2013).
- Estimated daily income – what Zombie Stat says you should be able to earn from your website every day. Mine say $2 a day.
- There’s other info there too – take a look and see what interests you.
So we need to track this data – and others such as our follower numbers, to see how and where we might be growing and not growing with time. This will show us what has been successful and where we might need to concentrate some more effort.
I use a spreadsheet and I’ve made a simplified version for you to use if you like. You can of course expand it to include other areas you want to track, and then pop in a diary note for once a week, or once a month to update.
You can download the spreadsheet from my Google Docs – Blogging Statistics.
I hope you find it useful.
Authored by: Deby at Moms Make Money
Jenna @ www.sensationallyseasonal.com
March 15, 2013 @ 5:11 pm
Just found your site today! Thanks for sharing all of this info. It is so, so helpful. I have subscribed. I find the way you have grown your blog really inspiring. Go you!
Deby at Moms Make Money
March 15, 2013 @ 6:00 pm
Hi Jenna, thanks for joining. Do take a look back through the Newsletter Archive and see what you missed. There is lots of info in thee yet to be published to the site.
Danielle
March 17, 2013 @ 11:32 am
Does Zombie Stat work if your site is hosted on blogger?
Deby at Moms Make Money
March 17, 2013 @ 11:47 am
No sadly not – it picks up the stats for blogger itself. You would have to make all of the searches separately to find the same information. Try alexa.com, http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php, and google analytics for your page views.