Increasing Blog Hits

My main goal with my blog is not to increase hits. It's to:

• Learn how to manage a blog.
• Learn how to work with gadgets and other technical aspects of blogging.
• Build a base of writing, and try to post often to keep my writing skills at least active.
• Discover what type of content is of interest to others out in the world.

That being said, it's still fun when I get a visit from a new state or country, or when I all of a sudden experience an incredible number of hits all at once.

Here's what I discovered about blog hits...New Ideas Welcome averages about 15 visits per day (I know this from my use of Google Analytics - click this link for directions on getting your own FREE account; that's a sample of my Analytics "dashboard" above.) Recently, though, I unwittingly created two blog posts that created an extreme spike in hits. One post referenced Facebook and social media and the other post discussed a prank bomb threat. On each of those days, my visits spiked to an average of 46 hits! That's an increase of 215%!!!! Just from using certain words.

What's also interesting is that the hits didn't come from people searching those terms. I know that from my Feedjit tracking tool, which helps me know if someone found my blog by using a search phrase, arrived directly through bookmarking, or happened upon it by clicking Next Blog. On the days when my hits were off the charts (at least MY charts), visitors found me by clicking Next Blog.

My conclusion from all of this is that certain popular or current words and phrases cause a blog to pop up more frequently during blog browsing. Since I again used those key words in this blog content, it will be interesting to see if I again have such a spike. I'll let you know...

(12/7/08 Follow up note: use of the keywords in this blog post did NOT increase hits. Hmmm...that means it's not the words themselves; it must be something else that I haven't figured out yet.)