Today’s task in the 31 Days Blogging Project is to so some analysis of other blogs in your niche – your ‘competition’.

Note: I use the word ‘competition’ hesitantly because the thing about blogging is that those blogging on the same topics as you are potentially your biggest allies. Connect and work with your competition and everyone improves.

This is actually an exercise that I recently recommended to a friend in the process of setting up a blog as part of his process in refining a topic. Having thought about it since I’m becoming more convinced that it’s actually a good exercise for established bloggers to do from time to time also.

1. Make a list of 10 blogs in your Niche
2. Get the RSS feed of each of these blogs and commit yourself to reading them each week
3. Do some analysis by asking some of the following questions:

• What do they do well?
• What are the boundaries of the topics that they focus upon?
• What don’t they write about?
• How often do they post?
• How long are their posts?
• What level are they pitching their blog at? (beginners, intermediate, advanced)
• What questions are their readers asking in comments?
• What style or voice do they write in?
• What type of posts seem to get the most attention (comments, trackbacks, incoming links)?
• What is their design like? What do they do well and what do they do poorly?
• What are other blogs writing about them (use technorati to check this)?
• If they have an open or unlocked stats package what can you learn from their stats? What pages are popular? Where does their incoming traffic come from?

Why do you need to ask these questions?

Good question – I’m glad you asked!

My reasoning for doing this type of analysis is not to copy other blogs in your niche (although you might find some things that you want to emulate) – but it is quite the opposite.

In asking these types of questions you will often find gaps in the niche that others are not writing about that your blog might be able to fill. You’ll also have a good feel for what is working and not working for others, might have some possible ideas for connecting with other bloggers in your niche, could come up with some potential post topics etc

Let us know what you find in doing this analysis in comments below.

Today your task in the 31 Day Project is to Introduce Yourself to another blogger

Email or IM another blogger in your niche to introduce yourself and your blog. You don’t need to ask them to link to you or anything – the point isn’t to get any specific outcome other than to touch base and hopefully build a relationship.

I find that the most fruitful interactions that I’ve had with other bloggers don’t come as a result of me asking for something – but out of me giving something.

What can you give? This will of course vary from situation to situation but it could a tip, a suggestion, a question for them to post about, an offer to write a guest post, a thank you for a good post they’ve written or a word of encouragement to let them know that you appreciate them.

While nothing may come of such an email (don’t be offended if you don’t get a reply) you might be surprised at the results.

My only other tip is to keep your email brief and to the point. Many bloggers are inundated with email and to be confronted with a long rambling email of introduction might not create the impression that you’re after.

Today your task in the 31 Day Project is to dig into your blog’s metrics or statistics package.

Take some time out today to do a little analysis of your blog’s statistics. There is a wealth of information in them that can be incredibly useful.

Here’s a few metrics to dig into to start off with:

• Most Popular Posts – what posts are being read more than other posts? Knowing this is important for a couple of reasons. For starters it gives you a hint of what topics you could write more upon – but secondly it gives you some key pages on your site to optimize (ie think about how you can drive people from these posts deeper into your blog – I’ve got a video post on this for next week).
• Referral Stats – what sites are sending you the most traffic? If it’s another blog or site, perhaps you could develop a relationship with them to see this increase. If it’s Search Engines, how can you adapt the posts to see it rise even more using on page SEO techniques).
• What Questions are being asked? – what questions are readers typing into search engines to find your blog? These could make great future posts (learn more about how to do this here).
• What Keywords are sending traffic? – knowing the keywords that people search for to find your site is very useful. It helps you to know how to optimize your blog for SEO even better and can give hints on what content to write more of.
• What seasonal traffic is there? – are there any seasonal trends that you should be aware of and could use to capture more traffic? What caused the bumps in traffic and how can you prepare yourself better for next time those conditions might happen again (read more on seasonal traffic and how to capture it).
• What’s Your Bounce Rate? – metrics packages like Google Analytics provide you with a ‘bounce rate’ stat which measures how many people arrive at your site and then leave again without viewing any extra pages. I find this a key metric to watch and attempt to change. Set yourself some goals to get this rate down and the page views viewed per visitor up by making your blog sticky.

There are many other types of metrics that most statistics packages will provide you with. Feel free to share the metrics that you check most often and how you use them to improve your blog in comments below.