Let’s face it. Views are the name of the game when it comes to blogging. Nothing is cooler than being able to say, “I got 18,000 views on my last post.” Of course, getting to that level of writing takes a long, long time and a lot of perseverance. But even if you have a small blog like mine, averaging 115 views per post, you can still usually tell if your views are starting to decline.

This can be seen in a few ways. Firstly, you might see a decline in your average daily views. Last month, my blog averaged about 85 views per day. Not terrible, not amazing, but pretty much average. That took almost a solid year of work just to reach in the first place. If, for example, I checked my average next month and found that I only averaged 60 views per day, warning bells would go off in my head. Obviously, something would be wrong, and I would attempt to find an answer.

Another way to tell this is by looking at your comments/likes on a post. My posts average 21 likes and 17 comments, and I can usually tell if one is above or below average at a glance. If it’s below average, I’ll start thinking- is it the time I published? Did I offend someone? There’s almost always an answer.

Finally, the last way to tell if your blog is losing readers is by looking at your average post views. My average post gets around 100 views after about a week, since some readers can take a bit of time to read them. Of course, if you’re publishing wintergreen content on a regular basis (content that could be read in ten years), your readers will continue coming back, making this statistic irrelevant. If you, like me, publish half-wintergreen content, now is the time to check your average post views. You can do so by clicking the WordPress stats panel, clicking “Months” to show your monthly statistics, and scrolling down. Under “Posts & Pages”, you will find your posts ranked by views, highest to lowest. This can be a fantastic indicator of which posts do better than others. If my Africa posts were towards the bottom of the spectrum, and my SEO posts were nearer to the top, what does this say? Obviously, some posts are read more then others.

There is, of course, a way to troubleshoot this. But before we get to this, let’s take a look at four reasons your views are declining in the first place.

Continue reading “4 Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Being Read” →