If your blog is your business it is a good idea to have tracking and analytics on your hand. Without those you cannot make the necessary changes or repeat what is working. You need to know where your business stands and also where you have to go to run a successful website. But your tracking and analytics won’t be worth a lot of you don’t know what to look for. Here is what you need to look for to point your business into the right direction.

Google Analytics is easy to set up for Bloggers. You just sign up for Analytics and then copy and paste the code into the head area of your website. It is much easier if you have a WordPress theme such as Genesis because then there is already a field where you just have to paste the code in. Even if you are new to all this it can be done with a blink of an eye. I show you how in the Living for Mondays Academy. You can learn it for no more than $1 in the next seven days.

Of course there are many other tools you can use. But Google Analytics is not only free but will also provide you with everything you need.

Always look for the posts on your blog which are the most popular. These are the posts people love to check out, comment on and generally stay on for some time. When you find a popular post you know you should give your audience more of those. Check which posts gets the most traffic and which one people share, this is the type of post and content you should go for.

You can find this data under the “Content” tab of Google Analytics.

Once you know what your readers love, you can try and put out more content along those lines. You can also put the most popular posts into your sidebar. You can do that manually with HTML coding or with the Popular Posts Plugin you can get free for your WordPress Blog.

 Have a look who is sending you traffic and where you get your backlinks from. It is good to know who your fans are. If you know that you can send them an email and potentially profit from a partnership. If you know who likes your content enough to link to you you’ll know where your potential partners are. You can start from there.

Who’s sending you traffic? Where are your backlinks coming from?

Check out what people type into the search engine to land on your site. The actual keywords people are typing in to get to your site could be totally different than the keywords you first set out to target. By tracking what keywords you’re ranking for and what people are typing in, you will get more ideas about what you should write aka what people are interested to read about. If you can’t think of any further keywords you should try Market Samurai so you can search for keywords related to those people type into the search engines. Market Samurai offers a free trial so you should really try it out – it will give you tons of good keywords that are worth to write about.

If you have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, you’ll naturally want to track the number of followers and likes you’re getting. You also should check how many people read your RSS feed. This will give you an idea if your headlines get people to read your posts.

If you keep these things in mind and check your stats every once in a while (e.g. every month or every week) you’ll be on your way to success. Because knowing what is going on helps you to get things right.