Using analytics to drive more traffic to my blog, part 6
Is there a correlation between a post’s popularity and its length? Maybe. I tried to prove this by pulling out a Page Metrics report from my favorite Web analytics tool and ranking posts by the number of sessions to it. This is what I found:
My theory is that the longer it takes for people to read a post, the more captivated they are, the more likely they will recommend it to a friend - the higher the session count for the post.
Definetly a simplistic theory but I have to run with this assumption right now and continue to grow my base of readers with longer, higher quality posts.
[Read other posts for this series: part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7]
You might be on to something there, ;^)
Your shorter posts don’t seem as valuable.
Your posts on Web 2.0 and Google Hacks weren’t really educational compared to your series on your Blog tests. The Blog Test series has been excellent. Great info about the kind of thinking needed for improving traffic and raising ROI.
Comment by Gus Kormeier — December 1, 2005 @ 9:03 am
Xavier, I spent the morning reading all the web analytics blogs I could get my hands on (a good use of an almost-holiday when no one is doing much else.) And what I learned is that, in general, short posts say very little (”Hey, did you see that Company A is going to buy Company B?”) and that long posts, like Eric Butler’s excellent post on Feedburner, are worth reading and printing out. I am even going to send his post to another blogger, not because it is long but because it has something worthwhile to say.
I don’t think it is just your short posts that are less educational — I see it everywhere.
Comment by Robbin Steif — December 21, 2005 @ 10:31 am
Some interesting ideas. Is it possible to get notified of future updates from your blog?
Cheers,
Wayne
Comment by Riverbelle — January 17, 2006 @ 5:23 am