I decided to do a little research on how this blog was doing. I went to Google Analytics, which records data on what keywords visitors use to find this site and exported the data into Microsoft Excel. Data has a funny way of changing your realities from what your gut thinks to actual reality. What we intended this blog to be about can be summed up in one sentence:
Thoughts lead to actions and actions lead to results, so to change your results, you must first change your thoughts.
This meant that Zac and I wrote mostly about thoughts, actions, analyzing the way you feel and think – basically changing the insides in order to affect the outsides, the results, in order to achieve success. What the analysis told me is that even though we are writing about all that, most visitors only care about one of two things, “How to Delete a Digg Submission,” and “Youtube Query String Parameters.”
Both of these subjects, or posts, are in the “Programming” category, which, out of all the categories (Actions, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Job Hunting, Life, LOST, Management, Marketing, Pop Culture, Small Business, Startups, Success, and Technology), Technology is probably the only one that is remotely close to being like it. All the others, besides LOST, are mostly homogeneous. So what we really have here is a kind of identity crises. It’s a question of who we are. It’s also an opportunity to innovate and make some changes.
Blog Analysis
Most popular posts and keywords are just one metric of the success or current state of a blog. For each keyword there are, “Pages per Visit, Average Time on Site, Percent New Visits, and Bounce Rate.” For example, the keyword which resulted in the most page views was, “youtube embed querystring parameters,” at 17 pages, whereas the keyword resulting in the lowest bounce rate, “creative avoidance,”at 42% also had 3 more page views per visit. This tells me that out of all Managing Actions blog posts, the most popular post that also captures the essence of this blog, “manage your thoughts in order to manage your actions”, is “Creative Avoidance,” by Zac.
I recommend breaking the “Programming” category off into its own blog and focusing on “Creative Avoidance“-type subjects along with the other popular trends in this category, “Purpose,” “Actions,” and “Confidence.” [Update: I have since started blogging about query string parameters (1,2) and how to stay alert. 9/15/2009]
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