Blog stats are life support

Apparently the theme for today among my circle of blogging friends was stats...you know, statistics. Turns out all of us have mild addictions to checking our daily (and sometimes hourly) blog stats. Scot over at The Virtual CFO confirmed this to me this morning while Chris and the folks at realVerse have been going through the roof today due to a wave of interest with the Rocketboom news and subsequent musings about filling the void.

Generally the page views and unique visitors are the primary points of interest but the other little gems are discovering how people stumble upon our blogs. All that information is available to the average blogger and is highly enlightening.

The unexpected thing I'm discovering about stats (both in myself and in discussions with others) is that there's actually more to it than seeing whether your numbers are up, down, or about the same as yesterday. They are actually a life support system that serves as motivation to the blogger to keep pressing forward even when it's hard. Stats are an easy way to validate whether people care about what you're doing, and when people care it's easy to remember why you're doing it. The down side of looking at your stats is that when they take a down turn you've got to keep up the same intensity and basically ignore that voice that might be ringing in your ear saying, "nobody's reading this stuff, you really should be doing something else with your time." My suggestion is to welcome the upswings with all the enthusiasm you've got and know the stats may come down...and if they do you'll keep blogging.