The perils of statistics
One of the things I’ve been asked a lot since I started working for myself, and especially since starting two new blogs earlier this month, is how many hits I’m getting per day. It seems a lot of people are more interested in my traffic than my content, which strikes me as putting the cart before the horse.
One of the traps that you can easily fall into when setting up a blog, or trying to get any kind of writing career off to a good start, is to spend too long pouring over your site statistics; wondering who is coming to read your pages, and for how long, and where they’re going when they leave. This is not a good idea, especially when you’re just starting out.
Let’s face it: few people get a massive audience right from the start. I’m not Miss Superstar with a fanbase that stretches across the planet; and if you’re reading this, chances are you’re not either. People like us don’t have an army of people watching our every move. We have to build our following, it won’t just come to us. So why are you checking how many people have come to visit in the first few weeks of your blog’s life? It’s not going to be a motivating factor, I can tell you that right now.
Good content is what you need, and that usually takes time to build. Yes you can set up a blog and put a wealth of information onto it on day one so you have good content – and if you do, it will make everything else so much easier – but for the most part, the first few weeks (even the first month or two) will be a hard slog to build up content and during that time, your hits will generally be low.
So let’s make a deal: don’t go checking your stats until you’ve got at least ten articles that lay the foundations of what you’re aiming to achieve with your blog. These are your pillars if you will, they’re what the rest of your blog will be built on. Once they’re in place, you can move on to trying to attract a readership but until they’re in place, attracting readers is like sending people to a theme park before the rides have been built.
Tags: articles, building readership, writing
