Friday, January 4, 2008

Use statistics to improve your writing

You write and post your articles on your website or blog, but you have no idea whether your articles are good or not. The ideal situation would be that you have mandatory poll where visitors must rate your article. However, using this technique you will certainly loose visitors. So what you can do? Use statistics from article directories. You should post your articles on article directories anyway, so you can use their statistics. Their statistics is far from perfect. You will probably find in the most of them only the number of views. So what is good about that and what is a View anyway?

A view is usually the number of users that found your summary interesting enough to click on the link to read the rest of article. The more views the better. This number alone will not tell you much about your articles. But if you compare number of views for all articles, you can find what articles have the most views. Investigate the article with the most views, and check what is good about it? Check the title and the summary. Viewer clicks on the link that leads to your article having only two or three parameters: Title, Summary and Author name. Also check your articles with the least number of views and try to find out what is wrong with them. Using statistics this way you can find out what your audience likes and what dislikes.

Sometimes you will have statistics about how many users decide to click on the link to your site (meaning that they like your article and want to see more of them). You can now repeat the procedure in order to find the likes and dislikes of your audience. The article directory with the best statistics is Ezinearticles where you can track these statistics:

* Views - Displaying the number of times this article has been viewed by visitors of EzineArticles.com


* EzinePublisher - Displaying the number of times the EzinePublisher link has been clicked for this particular article by visitors of EzineArticles.com viewing this article.


* URLClicks - Displaying the number of times a link in the body or resource box has been clicked for this particular article by visitors of EzineArticles.com viewing this article.


* Emailed - Displaying the number of times this article has been "Forwarded To A Friend" from visitors of EzineArticles.com


* Comments - Displaying the number of times this article has been commented on by visitors of EzineArticles.com


* Votes - Displaying the number of times your articles has been rated by visitors of EzineArticles.com


* Rating - The current rating of this article. The rating system is based on a 5-Star rating


How to track statistics for articles that are published in different period, maybe even in different year? The one that is older should have greater number of views, but the newer one might be better. It is possible to compare them using average views per day. You will have to calculate this by yourself as AVPD = Views / Days in public, where the Days in public is the number of days elapsed from the date of publication. For example article A is published 15 days ago and has 150 views, and article B is published 350 days ago and has 1050 views. The first article will have 10 average views per day, and the second article will have 3 AVPG. Therefore the first one is better. You can also record the number of views at the beginning and at the end of a certain period of time. This way you can calculate how many views a certain article received during that period of time. For example: 10 days ago article A had 900 views and article B had 30 views. Today, article A has 950 views and article B 150 views. During that period of time the article A gained 50 views and the article B gained 120 views. That means that the second one is the better. You can speed up this calculation with some spreadsheet program.

1 comment:

LmT said...

I'm quite new to blogging and I found this post of yours quite useful. Perhaps I'll attempt to apply some of these techniques in the future. Thank you =)

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