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?