The Wardman Wire

This is a series of late evening weekday Hints and Tips that I aim to post at around 10pm. I’ll keep going for as long as I have things to say.

In my last tip I said: Only look at your statistics on a Sunday if your are a new blogger

This tip suggests an extension to this rule:

Motivate yourself with quick statistics as you become more experienced.

Once you begin to get some traffic, you can set up a statistics package that lets you see how your blog is doing in less than 30 seconds. I use a Wordpress plugin called Slimstat The screenshot on the right shows the screen that gives me a summary of how things are progressing on this blog.

One of the mental tricks I use to motivate myself is to aim to surpass the previous month’s traffic by the 20th or 25th of a month, or the previous week’s traffic by Friday.

Alternative services that let you monitor the progress of your blog are Go Stats, Statcounter or Google Analytics .

If you have any good suggestions for motivating your blogging, or would like to reply to this post - please use the comments box below.