Let's say you come up with a knockout post idea, and just as important, a killer headline. You write the headline first, write a strong post around it, and publish.
How do you know if it all worked?
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of strong headlines. When you write your headlines, you need to be thinking like an ad copywriter. The sole purpose of the headline is to get people to read the first line of your post.
But how do you know which ones work?
Pageviews and visitors don't tell the whole story
Everybody looks at the pageview count. It's right there on the WordPress dashboard; I check it every time I log in. But pageview numbers aren't much good for getting feedback about the day's post. They show you how successful you were at getting people to click around your blog, but that's about it. (As I wrote in a post about annoying your readers, I don't think this should be your goal.)
If you're slightly more sophisticated, you look at visitor numbers, using a tool like Google Analytics. Not as much fun, since the numbers are smaller, but it's a less noisy statistic than pageviews.
Still, you need to know more than either of these can tell you. Neither of these stats tells you about your subscribers, those who are theoretically your most dedicated, important, valuable readers. Those who are open their Google Readers, look at the their lists of unread posts, and decide based on the headlines which ones they'll spend their finite amount of time reading.
You can track your subscriber count through Feedburner (good news: it's bigger than what Google Reader is telling you). But this number doesn't fluctuate much day to day. It's almost useless for short-term feedback.
No, the best stat I know of is none of the above. So what is it?
The beauty of the reach statistic
It's called "reach." An unassuming little stat you can get in Feedburner that gives you the most accurate measurement of your everyday audience, by tallying the number of people who clicked on or viewed your feed. And this is exactly the information you need to know how effective your headline was at motivating people to read what you wrote. (It even goes beyond your subscribers to include those who viewed your posts through some other sites that run your feed.)
To look at your reach stats is humbling, no doubt. Take a day off of blogging and your reach stat plummets, even though your pageviews might not change much due to steady search traffic or lots of incoming links. (For me, reach falls to about 10% of my total subscribers on off days. Pageviews stay steady.) Even on your best post-and-headline days, you might see reach numbers at only about 50% of the subscriber number.
No, reach isn't the sexiest blog stat, and it's certainly not the most fun to look at. But it's the one that can make you a better blogger, by teaching you the most about what works (and what doesn't) for your audience.
Thanks for this tip! AS a heads up Reach isn't automatically turned on. You have to configure your feedburner account. It's easy though – click one click!
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