Average Page Views Per Person - A Very Telling Indicator

Statistics - Determining the Health of Your Website

Keeping a close eye on what's happening with your website is alot like visiting the doctor... checking your pulse, blood pressure, weight, general health... I'm a firm believer in having as many statistics available as possible about your website.  It allows you to zero in on any problems, or take advantage of any patterns you see developing.

One thing I've noticed is that I'm holding fairly steady at 7.5 average page views per person.  This is a  very telling indicator to me - since much of my recent traffic was coming from a paid 'StumbleUpon' advertising account.  Being a member of StumbleUpon myself, I'm well aware of the difficulty you face in catching someone's attention long enough to get them to actually examine your site. It looks like I've succeeded - people are sticking around and doing some reading.

Now, either that makes me the next Tom Clancy - or people just recognize that there's some interesting material on this site, and hopefully BurningKnife will get some people thinking about their own website. I rather think, all modesty aside, that I'm not the world's most interesting writer - so it must be that I'm 'spilling the beans', and people like to read this type of material. As the weeks and months go by, I'm going to continue to add new material about how to earn extra money on the Internet - and earning money has always been a popular topic.

Most blogs - and right now, Burningknife is more in the line of a blog than a true community, do no better than an average of 1-2 page views per person - so I'm greatly motivated by these statistics, since I know I'm not running any scripts (such as a 'related content' script) that would boost these numbers.  So you readers out there are really taking the time to see what this site offers. I do hope you're bookmarking us as well!

Websites take a great deal of patience to put together, and even greater patience to profit from - but I'm quite convinced that it's the best way to go for the average person - it takes very little money to get started, and everyone has something interesting to say that can draw traffic. Many websites die a slow death from inattention and lack of traffic, but if you keep reading the articles here - you'll learn how to avoid this happening to your website.

Just a short update - in this article, I mentioned my starting Alexa rank of 14,382,667 the week this site went active - right now, just 23 days later, my Alexa ranking is 1,729,917 - so I'm certainly on track to break the 1 million mark in under two years. My link building campaign has begun, and that should lower that Alexa rating even more.

When you start a website - keep track of these sorts of stats - such as your Alexa ranking, the amount of traffic & page views, the number of pages that Google or Yahoo have indexed, the number of links they show - it's hard to know where you're going with your website unless you can see progress - and you can't see progress unless you know where you once were.

Since building a good website takes an extreme amount of patience - you need all the encouragement to continue that you can find - and keeping good statistics is a good place to find that extra bit of encouragement that you'll need.

Comments, anyone?