The assignment for Day 5 in the Blogging 201 challenge is to take a look at your blog statistics and see what they can tell you about how to better manage your blog.

I’m already a stats junkie. I check my stats page every day. I love to see lots of visitors and views. I really like to see where people are visiting from. I think it’s interesting to see people from all over the world looking at my blog and I wonder what brought them to my blog?

From looking at my stats, it seems like I must have a lot of people who like to drink! My most popular posts of all time (other than the home page and about page) are the ones on making your own booze! Peach or apple? Peach has more views, but maybe that’s only because I posted it after I had a few more visitors. What do you think?

After the booze posts, it looks like people are actually pretty interested in the maritime stuff. I wasn’t really sure when I started this if ANYBODY would be interested in that sort of thing, but it looks like there are at least a few. And, to my surprise, they’re not all other mariners! 🙂

It looks like the photography has a pretty good showing too. People like my travel posts, which is great since I haven’t really put much of my travels up on here yet. The food/drink/recipes get a lot of views too. 🙂

Even the political posts get a pretty good showing. The Worlds Smallest Political Quiz is right up there at the top! That’s really encouraging. I had hopes to get people at least thinking more about politics with my blog. 🙂

I can’t really tell much for a pattern as to when I get the most traffic. I seem to remember the weekends being high traffic days, but when I just looked at the most recent weeks it seems I have more traffic on Wed-Thurs-Fridays.

So, what have I learned from looking at my stats? Maybe I should post more home-made booze recipes on Friday to give everybody a head start on the weekend?

I’m already trying to stick to a Creature Feature post on Wednesdays, combining photos (maybe mine, maybe not) with some interesting information about some kind of critter. 😉

I’ve been trying to do a post on the Songs of the Sea on the weekend, since that’s normally when I have more time to get online to surf the web to try and find a video. I do love my music, it’s just hard to put the whole thing together into a post sometimes. 😉

Maybe I should try to put more of the quirky stuff, things I just find interesting towards the beginning of the week, tho I normally only post those things on the spur of the moment when I come accross them.

The thing that really stands out to me is the HUGE difference in my stats from when I had the time to work on the blog. When I had time to post every day (or close to it). When I had the time to post even more than once in a day. Those time periods were when I really got a lot of interest.

I can see that made a difference and I would love to be able to do that well all the time, but I just don’t really know how to make that happen. I’m doing about the best I can with working on the blog along with all my other projects (my JOB, looking for work, keeping my household running, taking care of my rental property business, traveling, photography, etc).

I guess I’ll just keep on muddling along and hope for the best. I’m learning more from this challenge, which is good. Looking forward to more in the Day 6 assignment. 🙂