Any news site or blog needs at least some readers. If not, it wouldn’t be very interesting for the author. To improve your blog and increase your reader count, there’s one golden rule: Know your visitors. Know what makes them tick, what they like to read, to what they react. This post describes a few ways to obtain this knowledge, focusing on PostRank, a great tool for this kind of research.
Most people already have Google Analytics, or a similar visitors analytics package installed. And if you haven’t, you really should. It’s an easy way to get a lot of knowledge about the origin of your visitors, the number, their behavior.
But visitor number isn’t everything. In fact, I believe they are a bit overrated. I think a much more important metric is what your users do with the blog post or news item they read. Do they react to it? Do they share it with their friends? Do they bookmark it for later reference?
It’s not easy to obtain this kind of information, but PostRank does a pretty good job at it. It takes a number of parameters (like number of comments and number of saves on del.icio.us) and calculates a “PostRank” for your posts. As with all metrics, it’s not perfect, but I think it gives a good idea.
Here are my current top 10 posts:
It’s as easy as going to the PostRank site and typing in your site.
Question to the readers: How do you analyse which post works and which doesn’t? Do you use another service that you like?
3 Comments
Hi Peter — Thanks for the post and helping to spread the word.
We think there's a lot more to understanding and engaging with your audience than a single metric, too, be it pageviews, comment counts, or what have you. The last little while we've been working on adding more international sources to the PostRank engagement metrics as well, since the sites we're most familiar with here in North America aren't necessarily the most popular in Brazil, Russia, Japan…
We're working on our own analytics offering as well, built on the massive amount of data we collect. We'd love to get your ideas/requests for features! http://www.postrank.com/publishers/analytics
Thanks very much for the tip, I've signed up for the beta and I hope I can start testing it soon.
Thanks very much for the tip, I've signed up for the beta and I hope I can start testing it soon.