I check my blog’s traffic way too often. I understand it is valuable to check Google Analytics in order to gain insights into the traffic that visits your website, but I find it very easy to get sucked into checking multiple times a day. I’ll check my Google Analytics, my wordpress stats, find out how my mailchimp campaigns are doing, and see if I have any new Google Reader subscribers. I think each of those is valuable, but I’ve decided it would be helpful for me to take a break from obsessing over my statistics so I can instead spend more time focusing on my writing.
How I Want to Use Stats?
I want to use statistics of all of those sites in the future, but in order to do it right I am going to take a break for the next 30 days to help cleanse myself of the mindset I was using to check those sites. Statistics are valuable because they help let me know what things are resonating well with the community of readers. If something is popular, I want to know in case there is something to learn from the way I wrote. Statistics are valuable because they can let me know if the design of my website or e-mail campaigns are effective. If I have a poorly designed website and cannot convert people into regular visitors, I might have a problem not with content but with poor design. And if you blog, ultimately you want to get people to become subscribers. If somebody subscribes to my posts, they get every single post that I write. Having statistics that let me know if I am gaining or losing subscribers. If I’m gaining I can be confident that some of the steps that I’ve taken are working. If I’m losing subscribers, I need to evaluate what I’m doing. And if they are just staying static, I might need to consider ways to make the option to subscribe more clear.
I don’t blog for the stats. But the danger is that the more that I check the stats the easier it is to let that become the end goal. I write because I love to write and want to share about the things I’m passionate about. For the next 30 days I’ll be fasting from checking the statistics of this blog. I’m not giving it up for good because it is valuable, but I’m taking a break so that I can do it in a more reasonable fashion.
Do you need to consider re-thinking how often you check your stats?
Really curious how this is going. Have you set up auto reports to be generated and sent to you on a regular basis?
I didn’t set up anything to be sent to me, because I just need a break from worrying about how many people were reading the blog. It’s been about a month so I’ll probably gradually start paying attention to it again.