Once a week? A day? An hour?

I’ve been known to obsess over blog traffic, especially if I’ve written something I think is especially profound and want to make sure the whole world shares my opinion.

Checking your blog’s traffic stats is actually quite useful, and not just for massaging your ego. By carefully studying what people are reading, where they’re coming from and where they’re clicking through to you can learn a lot. Including:

1. What topics are popular, so you can write more of the same. Based on a careful reading of my stats, I know that the most popular posts on WordCount have been on writing basics, blogs for writers, market intelligence and the fates of specific freelancers, good or bad.

2. What post formats work best, so you can write more of them. Based on stats, WordCount readers like posts that are lists, best ofs and how tos, plus posts on controversial subjects such as whether or not to write for content aggregators. Armed with that information, I now look for opportunities to do more of those types of posts. I’m also thinking of ways to aggregate those types of blog posts into an ebook or something else I could self publish.

3. What days of the week get the most eyeballs, so you can be sure to post on them. I get more traffic on weekdays than weekends, so unless it’s the May blogathon I sponsor every year and I’m blogging everyday, I blog M-F and take weekends off.

4. What reader-commenters are also fellow bloggers, so you can befriend them by leaving comments on their blogs or adding them to your blog roll, helping boost traffic for both of you.

5. What keywords are bringing readers from Google or other search engines.  If you know what people search on to find you, you can be sure to tag future posts on similar subjects with those same keywords. Top keywords and phrases that bring people here: word count, michelle rafter, qualities of a good editor, freelance story ideas and hyperlocal news.

How often do you check your blog stats? How has checking your blog stats changed how you blog?

This week, FWJ announced they’re looking for a paid blogger to write two posts a week. The pay’s $100 a month. It’s a job search with a twist. Instead of asking candidates to submit resumes, they’re running an American Idol style open audition. Interested candidates have until this Friday, June 13, to read the contest directions and then pitch themselves in the comments section of this FWJ post. On Friday, FWJ readers will choose their 12 favorite ideas, and over the coming weeks, all 12 will write a blog posts on a given theme and readers can comment on the bloggers and their posts. Bloggers will be eliminated as the weeks go on until the winner’s announced.

Because of the relatively low pay this won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but some might want to give it a go. So may the best blogger win. But will they be as cute as David Cook?

31 posts later, I’m at the finish line and here’s what I discovered:

It’s not that hard to blog every day, you have to “just do it.”

Not all blog posts are created equal. Some can be short. Some can simply point to other interesting stuff you’ve found online. Lists are crowd pleasers. Here’s some other great suggestions for types of posts from Problogger, a great source for anything related to blogging.

Regular blogging leads to more readers. Since the blogathon started, traffic to WordCount jumped close to 150 percent. If you blog, they will come. Here’s another great post from Problogger listing 23 ideas for finding new readers for your blog, including persistence.

It’s critical to tag your blogs so they show up when people do keyword searches on Google and other search engines. For a while I did what some search engine optimization experts suggested and only used a few tags per post. But I’m back to putting in about a half dozen or so, and I think it’s working.

Freelancers blog about all kinds of things. Some blog on the same subjects they write about. Jane Boursaw writes about the movies and her Reel Like with Jane Website and blog are full of entertainment industry news. Some, like me, blog about writing. Susan Johnston, The Urban Muse, is in a different place in her career and her take on freelancing is a refreshing change from mine. Other writers’ blogs are very personal, like Claudine Jalajas’ The @$#!% Extension, which chronicles her home addition, or Dawn Weingarten’s blog, where she writes about life after her husband’s organ transplant.

Blogging has been good for my writing. Compared to my other work, my blog posts are pretty chatty. That’s helped the stories I write for a consumer electronics Web site, where adopting a conversational, between-friends tone is a good way to explain tech topics that can sometimes be intimidating for the uninitiated. Here’s one example, this story on encryption I wrote recently for YourSecurityResource.com.

Some fellow blogathoners have been inspired to go after paid blogging gigs. I haven’t got there yet, but I’d consider the right offer.

So thanks to the other freelancers who braved it out. I hope you learned as much from the experience as I did.

I’m slowly building traffic to this site by:

¤ Posting a message on the online bulletin board of the freelance writer group I belong to whenever I put up a new post.

¤ Included an RSS feed button at the top of my blog, to encourage people to sign up to get new posts automatically mailed to them. See it up there in the top righthand corner?

¤ Using tags with common search terms on all my posts so they’ll get picked up by search engines like Google. I wrote more about this in a post called What Freelance Writers Should Know about SEO.

¤ Including the URL for this blog in my email signature.

¤ Including the name, description and URL in my LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn has a relatively new feature called Status that lets you write a short answer to the question “What are you working on?” so your LinkedIn connections can see what you’re doing. When someone looks at your LinkedIn profile, your Status sentence shows up at the very top, right under your name and job description. I use this feature to let my connections know about new blog posts. When I update my own “What are you working on?” description, the information appears on the Home page of all of my LinkedIn connections, so they can see what I’m up to – and hopefully, go read my blog.

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger offers some really good common sense tips in this post, 10 ways to improve blog traffic in 30 minutes or less. Among them: post your best stuff on the days of the week when you know you get a lot of traffic, and take time to respond to comments, so you’re building a rapport with your readers. Read Rowse’s other tips in the post.

Kathy Sena, a new online writer/editor friend, writes a blog called ParentTalkToday. In her email signature, instead of just listing a link to the blog, Sena also includes a line about her most recent blog post, which she rewrites every time she posts, and writes in a different color. The idea is for people to be so intrigued by what she’s written they follow the link to her blog. Here’s what it looks like:

Kathy Sena . Writer/Editor
Specializing in parenting, health, lifestyle and women’s issues
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Phone: 310-XXX-XXXX
Fax: 310-XXX-XXXX
Email: XXXXXXXXXX@XXXXX.net
Web: http://www.kathysena.com
Blog: http://www.parenttalktoday.com (Today we’re talking about keeping too many balls in the air…)

If you’ve got other tips for driving traffic to your blog, please share!