I often go on walks and think about random things. Yesterday I started thinking about how much I’ve enjoyed writing on this blog and how it’s essentially a digital learning journal for me, for what I’m learning/thinking on any given day. I’d say I feel much more in control since I started really tracking my finances on this blog, and I’ve really enjoyed talking to some of you. That being said my goal setting gene, from my actuarial exams, is starting to activate again…
I thought to myself what am I actually trying to do with this blog, how should I measure my progress, and is this something I even want to measure? Not every aspect of life needs to be analyzed. The blog started out as an outlet to keep myself accountable financially, and what better way to do that than post my finances every ten or so days. I then learned that I actually like investigating some of these personal finance topics and reporting back to people. It’s helped me get better at explaining topics, and really questioning statements/beliefs. I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed getting to know some of you and talking about some of the obstacles that you’re facing. And I would be lying if I didn’t mention that I found it a decent way to funnel eyes to my books, that are selling on Amazon. In some ways it’s been a crash course in marketing and sales, and while I’d probably be getting a failing score (I know the blog home page is still meh and uninspiring), I do think I’m starting to feel a little better with where I could see it going.
I started looking at the statistics they have on WordPress, which is the platform I use to write this blog, for my site and brought some of the data into Excel, which I’m typically inclined to do. So… What metrics are suitable for blogs?
I’ve definitely been posting more over time and I’m slowly getting more views and visits. I used to think views are the only thing that matter but are views everything? In December one can see a spike in views on Fired to Fire. December was the month I was posting a lot of summaries on the book Rich Dad Poor Dad and linking the posts to certain FIRE Facebook groups:
While I was getting a lot of traffic coming from those Facebook posts the views/visitor wasn’t extraordinary compared to other months I’d been posting. How does one measure quality of a blog? It doesn’t provide a whole lot of value if people click on a Facebook link, spend ten seconds on your post, get bored, and then leave. I want to find a group of people that are genuinely interested in the topics I’m posting (so I suppose number of subscribers would also be very important). I think going forward I will be focusing a lot on views per visit:
And with that I give you the goals I’ve identified for my blog, fired-to-fire.com, for 2021. If you have a blog I’d love for you to leave a comment and share what metrics you look at:
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