I tweeted this question a few days back and the variation in responses was quite interesting:

What metric or statistic do you most watch on your blog?

There’s no right or wrong answer to this:

• for some it’ll be mainly about traffic – for some it is visitor numbers, for others it will be page views.
• other bloggers are more interested in subscriber numbers – against there is variation here, RSS and/or Email subscribers.
• some bloggers are more regularly checking the bottom line – earnings. This might be affiliate earnings, advertising earnings or even the sales of their own products.
• another group of bloggers are more interested in reader engagement – so comment numbers, ReTweet counts or Facebook ‘likes’ might grab their attention
• some bloggers are more focused upon the social media space and are monitoring Twitter or Facebook follower/friend numbers or how often they are replied to or interacted with.
• other bloggers get more into the more detailed stats – looking at things like bounce rate, time on site, page views per visit, referrals (where traffic is arriving from) or looking at what the most popular posts are doing in terms of traffic.
• further still, other bloggers are more into SEO and are always analyzing how many links are coming into their blog, how their blog ranks for certain keywords etc.

Of course there are more things to watch – but for you, what’s the #1 metric that you tend to be drawn to throughout your day or week? And why?

For me it varies a little depending upon what I’m focusing upon.

For example – during a product launch I’m obviously looking more at sales of eBooks, conversion numbers and at testing sales pages.

On a normal day I’m probably checking traffic numbers and watching for spikes in traffic so that I can take quick action to leverage them. I tend to check income streams a little less often (once a day) during a ‘normal’ day.

Further Reading: 17 Statistics to Monitor on Your Blog

Time for a little reader discussion – this one inspired by a Tweet by @JessVanDen who asked:

“do you have a regular posting structure, or just post things as you think of them/find them. i.e. regular features or not?”

I’d like to widen the topic slightly and see if readers do any kind of planning of blog posts ahead of time – or whether they just blog as they sit down each day to blog?

My Answer – I try to do a bit of both each week – I look at the week ahead most Mondays and put together a bit of a plan of attack for the week – but I also tend to swap things around during the week as inspiration hits. Sometimes I’ll add extra posts into the schedule and on other occasions I might swap the plan around and post things in a different order.

What about you – do you plan your blog posts ahead of time?

Earlier in the year I asked readers whether they outsourced any part of their blogging in a poll. By outsourcing I was talking about ‘paying‘ someone else to do something on your blog.

Here are the results after 2195 responses.

I was actually a little surprised that the number was so small because in the introduction to the poll I included things like ‘blog design’ in what could be included in outsourcing.

Here are the types of things that those who said ‘yes’ said that they outsourced:

• tech/managing the backend (updates, plugins etc)
• product creation/design
• writing of posts – staff writers
• writing of posts – ghost writing
• blog/logo design
• marketing
• comment moderation
• SEO
• administrative tasks
• editing/proofing posts
• selling advertising

It’s been just over two years since I last ran this poll – so lets see if things have changed with the growth of WiFi and the popularity of mobile devices:

Looking forward to seeing how you respond!

PS: sorry about the ordering of options, ‘other’ should really have been the last one. Not sure why it ended up the top!

Last week on Twitter I was asked by @southrngurl6489 the following question:

If you had to pick only one thing that makes a blog stand out from its peers, what would you pick and why?

I thought it’d be a good question to open up to a wider audience as its something I’ve touched on quite a few times over the last year or so and because what makes a blogger distinct is often, by definition, something that can vary from blog to blog.

What are you doing to make your blog stand out from the crowd? What have you seen other blogs do that makes them stand out?

Further Reading: Here’s a post I wrote on the topic earlier in the year – The Power of Uniqueness [19 Starting Points for Being a Unique Blogger]

Back in 2005 I asked my readers a question that surprised some for a blog like ProBlogger – I asked readers to talk about what was wrong with blogging.

I introduced the question by sharing a story of a debate between a Christian group and Pagan group where each group was asked to not argue FOR their own belief system but to share what they disliked about their own Faith perspective. The result of that debate was fascinating.

Instead of it ending in an angry fight where everyone just had their beliefs reinforced the debate was actually quite constructive with both groups coming away having learnt something about the other and more importantly themselves.

Similarly the responses to my question about blogging were insightful also (in fact I’ve asked this question twice previously – in 2005 and in 2006 and both times were fascinating).

There were a couple of things that came out of those discussions:

• it was a place for some bloggers to get some stuff off their chest about their frustrations with the medium.
• the answers actually gave a number of blog tool developers some great ideas. I know that at least two WordPress plugins were developed to solve issues that came up in the conversation.

It’s been 4 years since I asked the question last – so in the hope of a productive conversation I thought it worth asking again.

What’s Wrong with Blogging?

What are the limitations of blogging as a medium? What are its weaknesses? Where does the blogosphere and/or blogging tools need to improve? What are you main challenges as a blogger that you don’t think you’d have in other mediums?

Hopefully in answering this question and deconstructing the medium of blogging a little we can play a part in the improvement of blogging as a whole. By identifying what’s wrong perhaps we can improve it.

Like last time the rules are simple – say anything you like about blogging as long as it’s not positive (note: I’m not inviting you to critique individual bloggers – but the medium itself). You can do this in comments below or by writing a post on your own blog (just leave a link below so we can find it). There are no wrongs and rights and everyone’s critique of the medium are valid and welcome.

So – what’s wrong with blogging?

Over to you!

Next week here on ProBlogger I will be beginning a series of posts with tips for bloggers in the first week (or month) of their blog.

I’m halfway through writing it (I’m hoping it’ll be useful to established bloggers starting second blogs too) already and have a heap of content written but thought it might be good to include a few reader and Twitter follower tips scattered through it as well.

I’m not so much looking for tips on Pre-Launch stuff like getting a domain, choosing a blog platform etc – I’m more looking for short tips on taking a blog that is set up to being an active blog.

So if you have any tips for bloggers starting out – I’d love to see them in comments below. I won’t be able to use them all but those I do I’ll certainly credit back with a link to your blog.

All I’d suggest is that you try to keep your tips relatively short and to the point as I’ll be using these as short snippets at the end of my posts.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Update: this series has been updated and compiled with other similar posts into ProBlogger’s Guide to Your First Week of Blogging – a week long guide into getting your blog going on the right foot.

A few days back I asked readers a question:

What Have You Been Putting Off and What’s Holding You Back?

Some of the responses to the question in comments (and via email and Twitter) revealed a lot of bloggers really wanting to step things up and get what they’ve been putting off done.

So – lets set some goals – what do you want to achieve by the end of February?

I’m not going to be calling you up to check up to see if you’re meeting your goals – but hopefully in putting them down publicly you’ll find yourself a little more spurred on to reach what you want to achieve.

My Goal for February: I want to get a new E-Book out the door by the end of the month.

In a quiet moment yesterday I asked my Twitter network:

“what’s one thing that you have been putting off that would improve your blog? (and what’s stopping you from doing it now?)”

The answers were quite varied – everything from redesigns, to writing E-Books, to posting more regularly to SEO optimization, to monetization.

A number of people reflected that just being asked the question helped them to move forward with things that they’d been procrastinating with – so I thought I’d ask the question again here on the blog.

Of course there can be good reasons for putting things off – timing is important and you can’t do everything at once – but if you’re anything like me there are things that you know you probably should be doing that you’re simply procrastinating about.

For me one of the big procrastinations for me until mid last year was creating a product of my own. I’d always said I’d write an E-Book – but every time I sat down to do it I never got past the planning stage (I have notebooks with about 10 different plans that never eventuated).

Why didn’t I do it? Was it laziness…. or busyness….? If I’m honest about it I’m sure it’d be a bit of both of those things – however I suspect it was also partly fear that held me back.

Fear that it’d flop, fear that nobody would buy it, fear that people would critique me for selling something and not giving it away for free, fear that it wouldn’t be perfect, fear that perhaps I didn’t have it in me to create a product like I wanted….

Actually – saying I was too busy might sound a bit better – I sound very insecure!

In the end – I knew that if I didn’t create an E-Book that I’d be kicking myself later. The time came for me to draw a line in the sand and just do it. I don’t have any secret strategies for getting over the hump of getting myself into gear really.

I did tell a couple of others that I was doing it – I did set aside two days purely to put it together – I did engage the services of someone to help me design it – I did set myself a deadline.

All of that helped me get going but in the end it was a change of attitude that got me over the hump.

“what’s one thing that you have been putting off that would improve your blog? (and what’s stopping you from doing it now?)”

PS: one of the reasons I started ProBlogger.com was to help those of us who procrastinate to be accountable to others. A number of our members over there are setting themselves (and each other) challenges to help them keep moving forward.

For example Paul recently set a challenge for members to create a free report/e-book to give away (that link is only viewable by members). What’s exciting to me is that a number of members have actually got their reports ready and launched as a result of working together in this way rather than just tackling their list of things that they must do alone.