If you do any type of web business, without a rudimental knowledge of web analytics, you will soon be out of business. Analytics can tell you which blog post people liked, how many visits you got on particular days, and how many seconds or minutes they stayed on the page. They can tell you which page they visited after they left your page, and which page they came from before. But, there is a lot that analytics cannot tell you.
If blog entry #254 got eight clicks, how many times was it promoted on Twitter or social media? Your analytics might not give you the whole picture.
If your blog entry did well the first time you promoted it on social media, it might not so well on subsequent tries. Your analytics will not be able to predit the long range predictability of your articles.
If you put a particular blog entry that is unpopular on the top of your feed and one person reads it, how does that affect your overall blog traffic? Sometimes I will put a popular blog entry at the top of my feed for a day or two before publishing anything else. Often times it will not get clicked much, but the blog traffic for the day will be a lot higher.
I have decided to employ a completely new strategy for my blog. There are posts that are experimental. I enjoy exploring new topics because they are fun to write about and sometimes lead to finding a new and popular topic to write about. However, most of the time, my readers do not share my enthusiasm for these new topics. My question is, how can I do my exploration and experimenting without alienating my readers? My solution is to use the first few days a month to try these topics out. I will publish an article every 8-12 hours so that if the readers don’t like it, the blog will submerge in the feed soon after. I have also decided to remove unpopular posts a few days after they are published. That way my feed will be all popular posts.
Another strategy is to create links from older and more popular articles that place well on google, and link them to newer less popular articles. On my blog, the articles from 2011 get the majority of the clicks while articles from 2016 that are often much better get none. I need to constantly change the links around to emphasize newer and more interesting content.