Imagine you are called to speak to a crowd of people. You don’t know who they are or what they’re interested in. You don’t know how many will show up to listen. All you know is that you get to talk, so you show up at a hall and start talking about whatever comes to mind. No, this isn’t stand-up comedy, but it could be. You realize you may not be funny. You begin talking and wait to see who shows up…but the hall is dark. You can’t see who’s there or if anyone is listening.

You’re a blogger.

I’m still learning the basics of this medium. A while ago I wasn’t sure if anyone was reading this stuff. But every once in a while I got a nice comment, so I knew that there were at least a few people out there. An article by Stephen Downes got me thinking about site design, content, and mission a little more carefully. I also found a discussion on ProBlogger about stat counters. I notice there’s another more recent discussion there on the same topic. I learned why people check their “stats.” I didn’t know anything about stats. I registered with a couple of sites that have helped me see where my site traffic is coming from. Statcounter gives the most information. MyBlogLog, tells me which of the links I post are being followed, so I get a better idea of what people value. Feedburner tells me how many requests there were for my feed. I have Webalizer on the Cpanel that my domain host provides, but the data is not as usefully presented as I’d like. There are also the server logs. But those aren’t real user friendly. If I ran a hot dog stand, this would all be obvious because I’d be there interacting directly with my customers handing them stuff.

I’m not sure if the services I’m looking at are very reliable, but I’ve learned some things. Titles are important. So are the first few lines of text. A lot of people visit my site from Google searches. I put a post up a few weeks ago for a joke that I called Adults Only. That got a lot of response from some people who were probably disappointed. My lesson plan wiki (now with restricted access) experiment was getting a fair number of hits also. I was amazed to see that was being indexed on Google and teachers (I guess) are looking there for lesson ideas. I was probably a big disappointment there, too. Maybe I should start writing more thorough plans (and reopen it for general viewing). I would never have guessed. Technorati tags have sent me some visitors, also.

Blog titles are powerful in their ability to help search engine traffic find its way to the blog. I suppose I should be choosing descriptive labels for the post titles, as opposed to the more cryptic headings I sometimes choose. Also, the first few lines of the post are what is usually in the search summary.

Just because there aren’t a lot of comments on your site doesn’t mean your blog isn’t being read. They’re there. Always listening. It’s something to consider.