Here is what I have not been doing for the past couple of weeks: obsessively checking the statistics for my blog on Google Analytics. This is more life-changing than you might think.
The nice thing about having a blog is that you can get some immediate gratification for writing, which is otherwise a slow, lonely, low-reward job. This is especially true if you’re a fiction writer working on something long, like a novel. There are years and years in which you sit in front of a computer going on faith that someday, someone might actually want to read this monstrosity into which you are pouring large chunks of your life.
Google Analytics can give you a great deal of information about who is coming to your website and why. With Real Time, you can kind of stalk the people who are on your site at that very moment, seeing where they’re from and what it is they’re looking at. This is not something that I ever do, of course. (nervous cough)With a blog, you write something and in seconds it’s out there for the whole world to see. The catch is that you really do, in fact, want the whole world to see, and that can get a bit obsessive.
Mostly what I obsess over are my pageviews. Are they increasing? How many people looked at my blog today compared to yesterday? Which posts seem to attract the most traffic? Which topics? What can I do to make everyone happy? Why doesn’t anyone like me? What’s it all about? What’s the point, anyway?
So, you see how that can go and why I’ve stopped. A couple of weeks ago I asked myself whether or not I would keep writing my blog if no one read it at all. The answer was yes, though that would still really suck. So I thought it best to say good-bye to Google Analytics.
Except for today, where I offer you a poem made up of the top search terms that lead people to this site. It’s very post-modern, trust me.
Organic search traffic
by Robyn Ryle and Google Analytics
(not provided)
rain
ray lewis body
top fiction books
you think too much
jack lambert
think too much
why girls can’t play “boy” sports google scholar
lauren silberman
sociology cowboy boots
i think too much
pane rustico
praying mantis eating
jane eyre
That. Is. AWESOME!
Thanks, Craig. I feel I could have cherry-picked search terms to make a prettier poem, but I decided there’s beauty in the unedited truth.