Graph Your Own Progress with Blogging

I received an interesting note from a reader not long ago who works in Internet marketing. He mentioned that for years, he had worked for another Internet marketer who.. well, let’s just say he wasn’t the greatest boss. The overbearing boss insisted on a lot of things, but one of these was on “the numbers,” through which his employees gathered data about their marketing efforts in order to turn those numbers into graphs and charts.

“I hate to admit it,” my reader said in email, “but he was… he was right. I started a new project recently and I realized that I need to know which posts were getting the most attention so I could assess my progress and make changes. That meant starting a spreadsheet and keeping the numbers.”

A lot of people think of writing and numbers as two things that don’t go together. Why, our educational institutions even treat them as separate. I remember, way back when, getting a “verbal” and “math” score on the SATs. Most of us don’t realize that this division between the written word and the numbers of our lives isn’t always as distinct as we’d like it to be.

Specifically, when you publish a book, you have numbers associated with it: Audience numbers, sales numbers, ratings numbers… even numbers you can’t always get your hands on, like how many pages the reader got through before he or she gave up on the book (versus whether they finished it, etc.).

This is actually the reason modern social media exists. It’s a demography engine that seeks to quantify different demographics of people in order to show you ads you’re more likely to click. That’s a fancy way of saying that modern social media gathers data in order to quantify the audience.

“Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can do the same. Go about your business and blog however you want… but don’t be afraid to peak into that “back end” where the numbers for your posts are kept. Look at your control panel, you dashboard. Look at what people liked most. Look at what they liked least.

Which posts were most popular? Which got the most traffic? If you keep a regular eye on these figures, you can also quantify other things, like the speed with which a post reaches its first 100 views (or whatever number you pick).

The goal of looking at the numbers is simply to see what you’re doing that resonates most with your readers. You could stop there… or you could use that information to inform your future ventures. If a certain type of blog post or content is most popular with your readers, it stands to reason that type of content would be a better choice for your next book… and so on.

Numbers, data, aren’t useful in and of themselves. They only become useful when we draw conclusions from them in order to inform our future actions. Don’t ignore the numbers! Chart your progress with your blog and use it to your advantage.

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*This blog was written 100% by a human and contains no AI-generated written content.