1 Minute 18 Seconds: An Analysis of My Blog

mymind
(From December 2010)

I don’t put a whole lot of weight into all of the sites that can analyze your blogs (because I am not a business selling ads) but I figured it was the start of the new year and why not take a look at my site through the lens of some data? This is a bit of a narcissistic post, then. A bit of navel gazing.

I first went to my own blog dashboard to get some overall basics.

First of all, I have been blogging here for almost six years (wow – has it been that long?) I started during a Tech Matters week with the National Writing Project, at the urging of a friend, and never looked back. This blog has really become the centerpiece of my online writing. I go to other places, and do other things, but this blog is where all of my connections and reflections begin.

In that time, I have pressed that “publish button” almost 1,800 times, and approved more than 3,000 comments. Meanwhile, my spam filter has been awfully busy, catching and deleting 27,000 errant comments. (Take that, you spammers! You won’t be using my writing to sell your sneakers!)

Second, I plugged my site’s domain (which is hosted by Edublogs, by the way, which has served me well over the years. Sure, there are periodic bumps in the road, but mostly, James Farmer and Sue Waters at Edublogs have been responsive, helpful and forward-looking when it comes to developing Edublogs) into The Website Grader. This analysis site let me know that:

  • the readibility level of my blog is secondary/high school level, which is a fine mix of where I want it to be;
  • that I have “too many images” which might bog down the load time for viewers;
  • that I have 259 sites that are now linking to my blog. I’m not sure who they are or what they doing with me, which is a bit unsettling and yet I feel strangely appreciative for being noticed enough to be linked;
  • my site has been bookmarked 100 times on Delicious;
  • my “traffic rank” is a measly 0.02 % — not sure what that means, except it uses the Alexa system to rank my blog in the midst of every website out there.

Next, I turned to my Feeburner, which tracks direct RSS subscriptions activated right at my blog, to what it has been finding out for me. It tells me that:

  • I have an average of 49 daily RSS subscribers;
  • I have an average daily “reach” of 7, which is the number of folks who click through to go deeper into my content.

And then, I was off to my Google Analytics for another view of my visitors. Here, I found out that:

  • in the month of December 2010, I had about 1,800 visitors to my blog;
  • 75 percent of those visitors were deemed “new” to my site (probably a result of the Edublogs Awards);
  • The average reader spent about 1 minute 18 seconds at my site (speed readers?);
  • Visitors arrived from 77 different countries, although mostly from North America;
  • 38 percent of my visitors used Firefox compared to 27 percent who used Internet Explorer. I couldn’t help but notice that Chrome is making a good dent, though. I wonder if 2011 will be the year of Google Chrome?

Isn’t it amazing how detailed information you can now get from turning your website inside out? With Google Analytics, the data gets broken down even further than what I have shared here and while it is more useful for a business (again, ads), I found it interesting to get a sense of who comes here to hang out with me.

That would be you, right? Thank you and I hope you can stay for your 1 minute and 18 seconds of reading time. Feel free to add a comment, too.

Peace (in the information),
Kevin

5 Comments
  1. Interesting Kevin. I got blog stats sent by WordPress for both of my blogs. It was interesting and surprising to learn some of that. Your stats go deeper, however. I might give these sites a try, just to see!
    Lynn

  2. Here is an interesting thing: I just put my identical blog info into the Website Grader a couple of minutes apart (I had used the wrong email address the first time) and it came out with two different grades, 13 points apart! I will go with the first one!

  3. Funny post! I love getting those reports from websitegrader and not fully understanding what it all means. That, combined with Google Analytics, really does give you more info than you could possibly digest.
    Heck, all I really want to know is – how many people are visiting my blog and how can I get more??? ha.

    Larry

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