Why Numbers Are A Major Blog Killer

Numbers have a large impact on our blogs and how we as blog­gers inter­act on it. These num­bers I am refer­ring to are any kind of num­bers that you see on your blog every day; sta­tis­ti­cal infor­ma­tion basi­cally. How many com­ments per posts you get, how many com­ments you have on your blog, num­ber of pageviews, etc. etc are all things we look at and ana­lyze each day.

All of these num­bers we have access to can be good for us, or bad.They are good in the terms of help­ing us see how our blog­ging strate­gies are, and how we can build off of them to improve our blog even more. But, hav­ing access to all of these num­bers and over think­ing them can prove to be a bad thing.

I believe that it is easy for look­ing at some­thing like traf­fic num­bers, or com­ment num­bers to really let you reflect on how good of shape your blog is really in. If you take those two num­bers too seri­ously and let them per­suade you enough that they aren’t what you like, you can get your­self into a seri­ous situation.

It’s com­mon for any blog­ger, espe­cially aged blog­gers of about 3 – 6 months to read through all of those dif­fer­ent sta­tis­tics and judge their blog way too hard. We all like to think that since we have been blog­ging for a few months now, things should start going our way. It’s not true all the time, but we think it should be. I know I think like that too, but then when I take a look at some of those num­ber sta­tis­tics, well let’s just say I will be sur­prised every once in a while!

It’s Easy To Over-Obsess About Every Lit­tle Number

In blog­ging, we seek for per­fec­tion, right? Why be the sec­ond best when being the first is an option? When that con­cept is under­stood, it’s then that any minor mishap on your blog will cause you trou­ble. Those num­bers prov­ing to be the biggest prob­lem of them all.

I’ve talked about obses­sion before on this blog, and I basi­cally con­cluded that it’s not worth the trou­bles. I feel like obsess­ing over sta­tis­tics on your blog is com­pletely a bad idea.

Like any other obses­sion, it will take up your time

When improv­ing a num­ber like com­ment count or Unique Vis­i­tors, you need to spend time both inter­nally and exter­nally for your blog. Exter­nally being pro­mot­ing your blog on other sites, and inter­nal improve­ments, the most impor­tant kind of improvement.

Spend­ing too much time get­ting involved with these num­bers can actu­ally make them go even lower because of how time con­sum­ing and dis­tract­ing it can be.

Com­par­ing Your Num­bers to Other People’s

One thing that can be more stress­ful to you more than any­thing else is com­par­ing your blog to another person’s blog. Obvi­ously you won’t have access to all of their infor­ma­tion, so you are lim­ited in see­ing who is bet­ter at what, but a lot of the times you can com­pare these num­bers with other bloggers:

• Com­ments per post
• Top com­men­ta­tor counts (if you use the plugin)
• Poll votes (if you use the plugin)
• RSS Sub­scribers
• Num­ber of received trackbacks
• Pages of posts

If you have a rival or some­thing in your niche, I bet that you check up on their blog a lot. When you check them out, I bet you com­pare some of the things I listed above too. Doing that is where you can either make or break your ego.

Deal­ing With the Fact Some­one is Bet­ter Than You

Let’s face it, the chances are that there is some­one bet­ter than us at what we write about. They get more com­ments in a post, more track­backs sent about the post, get talked about more on Twit­ter, and so on and so forth. It’s a chal­lenge for us to be the bet­ter blog­ger, but it’s some­thing that is rarely done.

When you see some­one bet­ter than you, it can be annoy­ing. Espe­cially if you have been blog­ging longer than them. When you see bet­ter num­bers on another blog and com­pare them to your own, you should always con­sider what they have done to get bet­ter num­bers than you.

How Do You React?

How seri­ously do you take your num­bers on your blog. Have you got­ten to the point in your blog where what­ever num­bers you get a day in any aspect of your blog are just a sec­ondary thing to worry about? Or do you see num­bers as a more pow­er­ful influence?

Photo by Stephen Coles

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