Rethinking the blog 2: Looking at the origins and statistics

I am sharing with you the steps in the process of rethinking the blog.  You may not find very interesting reading what changes I decide to make to my goal, audience and content in my blog. But you can see how to set up a thinking framework and a process to do that.

In this first step it's time to look at the data. Search for it and gather it all together to better see the patterns.

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A picture of the past

Goal

I write and review a vision to describe my ideal life. The main point related to creation and creativity is:

I am working on one or more of my own creative projects thanks to having the skills, resources and contacts that allow me to create freely.

Derived from this I thought I needed something that could:

1. Train me intro creating something everyday.
2. Serve as a starting point to create forward momentum and as a experimentation space.
   
3. Expose myself to external feedback.

I could have done a lot of different things to meet these points, but I decided to do a blog with daily posts because there were also other secondary goals that a blog would help me to pursue.

Primary and short term

• Building the habit of writing a daily post to train and create momentum.
• Publishing it on a blog exposing myself to feedback and using the space for experimentation.

Secondary and short term
Try and learn the technical, practical side of things related to web marketing such us: how to set up google analytics, AdWords and AdSense. The impact of a specific tweet, facebook share or other online comments in my visits.
Secondary and mid term: Sell mini-products and, eventually, create a store space to experiment further with selling virtual goods.

Audience

External feedback is valuable and scarce in comparison with your own, continuous, internal opinions.

Visits overview
658 - Visits
458 Unique visitors
1,127 Pageviews - 1.71 pages/visit
Avg. visit duration 00:01:52

Newsletter subscribers
12 subscribers
I personally know 7 of them (Spain and UK friends)
I don't know the other 5 who are from different countries.

AdWords experiment
358 visits
Bounce rate 89.11%
5 subscribed (1.40% conversion rate)
Note: The experiment is to test copywriting and CTR, but not to get subscribers.
Keywords (clicks)
Creativity 56, Motivation 22, Creation 19, Inspirational thoughts 10, Creative thinking 5

Newsletter reports
2 campaings sent (May and June summary)

.
Sent
Opened
Clicked
Unique clicks

May
5
3
1
15

June
12
6
3
20
(2 links broken!)

Sources
Organic search: 34 visits
Twitter: 34
Email: 13
Kickstarter: 12 (link about intuiti cards)
Facebook: 7

Content

That is ome raw data about the posts including: publishing date, title, main and secondary topic, word count, images created by me, videos created by me, minimun unique visitors (if know), avg. time in page (for tracked visitors), how many visits started in that post (from direct external links), number of comments, tweets (from the post), fb likes, my personal subjective value of the post in terms of quality, expression, appropiate content, lenght, etc. And finally a space for some other comments.
There are also some sums and medians for word count, images, videos and subjective value.

AlejoLab: Post list and stats

Other data that could not be gathered:

• Because most of the posts can be read directly in the main blog page I don't have precise data of how many times a specific post has been read.
  
• There is no data for the time of the day each post was published. I have the feeling that most of them were late in the evening, and some long into the night.
• Organic search terms are not available because I haven't configured properly the Google webmasters tools that tracks when your contents show up at searchs, with which keywords and how many times is clicked.

Coming next. I look at data and shape it to see what's telling me, drawing some conclusions.

< Rethinking the blog: setting up a thinking framework

Rethinking the blog 3: thou who seek shall find >