Day 20: Confessions of a New Blogger: Life's Tough. Get a Helmet.

Okay, so this isn’t a Christ­mas post, but on the 20th day of my exper­i­ment, I just wanted to reflect a little.

I’m pretty new at all this. I haven’t really had a forum for peo­ple to lis­ten to my music before, and I haven’t blogged much at all, as you can see. (Maybe it’s the influ­ence of my sis­ter, who calls them “blah­h­h­h­h­h­hgs.”) But now that all this stuff is out there, I’ve learned a few things–some of which I didn’t really want to know.

When John set up my site, he added Google Ana­lyt­ics — stats designed to help me, but instead, they make me crazy.

Like these cat­e­gories, for example:

Bounce Rate: This is how many peo­ple look at a page and imme­di­ately leave it. But to me, it screams: “This is dumb.” And I actu­ally have 100% bounce rate on a few things, and I have to admit – it’s a lit­tle hard to take, and I say to myself, “You’re right. That IS dumb. Don’t know what I was think­ing.” Or “Yeah, I never liked that song, either.”

% Exit: I think this is a stat that tells you which pages are the last to be viewed, in other words (to me), the thing that makes some­one say, “That’s it! I’ve had enough of this site! I am SO out of here!” Wow. I should delete those. Only prob­lem is, peo­ple have to exit on SOMETHING, and by the time I’m done delet­ing, there won’t be any site at all.

Aver­age Time on Page: If this relates to a song, and the aver­age time is only 30 sec­onds, I think, “What?! They didn’t even get past the intro!” And then, “I always knew that intro was too long…” And then, inevitably, I have to face the real truth and say to myself, in my most grown-up voice: “Okay, Shawna, just admit it. They didn’t like your song. Life’s tough. Get a helmet.”

And lastly, there’s Viewer Loy­alty: A per­cent­age of the peo­ple who come back. Mine isn’t as high as a seri­ous blog­ger would like it to be. …. This takes my crazi­ness to a whole new level. “Just take the sheet music and run”.….I feel like I’m stand­ing at the door, call­ing out, “But what about all the other stuff?!?!” as I watch some­body leave as fast as they pos­si­bly can. And since I don’t want it to end on a bad note, I add, meekly,  “Okay then.…it was good to see you.….Come back sometime…”

Actu­ally, I’m kid­ding. Mostly. I’m not really a bas­ket case–I’m just a lit­tle sen­si­tive. And so I take a minute to look at the rest of Google’s stats, which tell me that I’ve had a whole grun­dle of page views, and that peo­ple are stay­ing longer than I expected, and that makes me feel a lit­tle bet­ter. So, if you’re read­ing this, thanks for vis­it­ing. And thanks espe­cially for stay­ing long enough to read the entire post.…and I’ll try not to have a break­down if you leave the site now.