What category of posts works for your blog?

How do you decide which category of posts work better on your blogs vis-a-vis other categories?

If you’re not doing this already, I think its time you determined how to get this done. Its quite essential to have a mechanism to determine what works best for your blog.

Darren (ProBlogger) listens to delicious bookmarks as a sounding board to determine if a new type of post was accepted widely by his readers. The more the number of bookmarks, the better.

I recently started using a similar method: I started analyzing traffic reports from Google Analytics and the AWStats software hosted on my web server. These two put together has been helping me a fair bit determining the sources of traffic and for which keywords.

I still don’t have a large RSS reader base even though the traffic on the site is increasing by the day. I guess this will eventually pick up. So, given this state of affairs, using FeedBurner Flares as Darren is doing is ruled out for me for now.

What other patterns can you look for?

1. Number of bumps at BUMPzee: This is too blogger specific and might not be a great source
2. Number of diggs: Again, not really a great source for analyzing traffic patterns
3. StumbleUpon: This is a very good source. Again, its similar to delicious
4. Number of comments for your posts: Hmm…you might get traffic but not necessary that everyone will comment. So again, not a good benchmark

Basically, social bookmarking sites is the key to determine what works for your site?

I don’t know if its a good practice or not, but recently I started bookmarking almost all my posts to StumbleUpon and delicious. Did it help? Well, let me say, it really helped a great deal. I have seen a almost 100% jump in traffic eversince I started doing this and the traffic is slowly but steadily increasing. A good indicator for this is the Alexa/Technorati rankings.

For Alexa, I see the ranking jumping up a few 1000 points every week. Its hovering around ~210K right now up from 400K+ a a month back. Last week it was at ~240K. The jumps are not huge, but its a good indicator that the traffic is slowly but steadily coming to the site. And a key to this is understanding where the traffic is coming from and for what.

Share your thoughts on this. What works for you?