Stats Galore

Task 4 of Blogging 201 basically revolves around crunching the numbers and using those crunched up numbers to create more numbers to crunch, later on.

So I thoroughly went through my stats from the time I started this blog back in May of last year to today and came up with some interesting facts.

I have received a thoroughly stupendous 1146 views (as of the moment I wrote this) since I started this blog about 9 months ago. A vast majority of those views have come when I took part in Blogging U‘s other courses like Writing 101, 201, Blogging 101 and now 201. That is understandable for a fairly new blog like mine. Recently, however, I’ve been starting to use tags more productively and that has bumped up my views ever so slightly in comparison to the time when I didn’t use them that well.

My most productive month in terms of views so far has been November 2014 when I took part in Blogging 101. I received 358 views in that month. In the productivity list, November 2014 is followed by January 2015 (197), December 2014 (165) and October 2014 (127), all suffering major view drops, again, quite understandably.

Further putting the magnifying glass to the paper, my most productive days so far in terms of views have by far been Wednesdays and the two weekend days of Friday and Saturday. Sunday wasn’t far behind. I am unable to understand why it is that I’m getting so many views on Wednesday, a day smack dab in the middle of the week. That’s probably because people see that they’re in the middle of the ocean and the shore is not closer from any side and it is in this despair that they plunge into the emotionally rewarding world of the Internet and thus end up on my blog. Huh.

Anyways, one man’s loss is another’s gain and I’m going to keep exploiting this human weakness to the mid-week and try and publish more posts around this highly rewarding day.

Coming to views for posts, my most viewed posts/pages were the Home Page and About page by a long distance. They were followed by, again, posts from courses by Blogging U. Stats for likes and comments were similar.

Speaking of referrers, I had a significant number of people arriving via Search Engines, Facebook, The WordPress Reader and Tumblr. A few also came from my Gravatar bio page and from other sites and blogs that contained the link to my blog in posts of their own.

One of the things that surprised me was the number of views a certain post ‘From Your Sister, With Love‘, received. It was published in early October 2014 and I hardly meant for it to get more views than my About page. It was just another post that I thought wouldn’t score very well. But it ended up doing just that and then some. To add to that surprise, I realised that 7 of the 9 known search terms related to this post and people had been redirected to this post of mine about 10 times by using these search terms. I didn’t expect this particular post to stand out so well, but it feels good that it did.

What confuses me a little after this little bit of stats is that this high-flying post I talked about comes under a category that I would hardly write about on my blog. It was basically a college assignment that I thought I could share here. Turns out people kinda like this sort of stuff, and even I’m not completely sure what I would classify it as but I’m going to try and figure it out.

Not surprisingly, my most popular tags and categories pertained to Blogging U’s courses. Now that I’m taking part in another Blogging U course, I’m bracing for a brief spike in stats that won’t, hopefully, dip as dramatically as it has before.

Coming to the editorial calendar, its something I’m doing for the first time. I’m going to try to stick to the goals I sketched out in Task 1. I’ll continue posting for Awesome Quotes every Friday, which will ensure some of the weekend traffic and I’ll schedule more posts for Tuesdays and Wednesdays to get some of that mid-week traffic I’ve been getting. That does it for the ‘at least two posts per week‘ goal. And hopefully for the ‘get more followers‘ goal as well.