How to analyze the posts on your blog

It’s the time of year when we all review our blog’s performance during the previous 12 months, and plan our our goals for the next.

One thing we probably all do is review our most successful posts and analyze them to work out how we can achieve more of the same. But do we look at the “failures” and try to establish what not to do next year? More on that later. Let’s start with the positive.

I like to look at posts based on three areas: Subject, title and content. Take your top ten posts of the year and have a look at what they are telling you:

Subject

What are the popular posts about? The answer may help you decide on the direction of your blog, or at least what you should write about more. In my case, they’re varied, which I’m pleased about. I have two related to Twitter, but the rest are a mixed bag. My most popular is about helping bloggers get their partners on board with blogging, so there’s a clue to a subject we’ll be covering in more detail.

Title

Is it clear from the title what the post is about? Or is it a cryptic one? In my case, a couple have obscure titles, but they are landing pages. The rest clearly state what they are about.

Content

What size of content is working? What style of content? Interestingly, with mine, they are almost all “long text” posts – more than 200 words. So either I don’t write short posts well, or you don’t enjoy them! It also surprised me that only one of my top ten was a video.

Summary

What do I get from this? You enjoy longer posts, in text, with clear titles that explain what they are all about, and on a variety of subjects loosely related to blogging and making money from blogging.

There’s my template for 2010 posting!

Now have a look at the least successful posts on your blog. We’ll do mine:

Subject

The subjects of my ten worst posts were all over the place, ranging from Twitter to keywords. So no real clue there as to what was wrong with them.

Title

Almost all of them had a title that didn’t really give a good idea as to what they were about. They are all cryptic: “SMS messaging will never work” “Cool Video” and “Take some action” are examples. This is a huge lesson for me. I need to sharpen up my title writing. What you want is clear titles that explain what you’re going to get.

Content

Three were videos, and of the rest all bar one were shorter posts. This reinforces that you’re not that interested in video (shame, ‘cause I like doing it!) and that my shorter posts just aren’t hitting the mark.

That’s it! Now do the same for your blog, and feel free to post a link back in comments. I’d be really interested to see your findings.