I don’t look at my blog’s statistics very often, maybe once every few months.
But I got curious: what would happen if I just followed the data? What if I looked at the stats, and solely optimised to increase views and readership?
The answer: this blog would be a shrine to Amazon and Jeff Bezos.
‘Write like an Amazonian’ and ‘Type 1 and Type 2 Decisions’ have collectively had more than 25x the number of views than the 3rd most-viewed post.
I suspect this is primarily down to my posts lucking out on SEO; hitting a lot of the key words when people search for these terms.
All of this to say: if I was optimising this blog based on the data, it’s focus, sound, and feel would be very different.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to become an Amazon-focused blog. But it is a lesson in carefully selecting the inputs for our optimisation decisions.
Even if the data looks promising, it could be sending you, your writing, your service, or your product in a direction you never intended it to go.