A Good Word for WordPress

I moved all my blogs over to WordPress several years ago. I did it because that’s where the community seemed to be going, and although it was more difficult to manage at first, subsequent versions have become simpler and simpler (unless I’m getting smarter). However, the blogging platform is relatively unimportant; the underlying value of WordPress is the community. And not only the community of developers who volunteer to make the code better–the most important part is the community of readers. Apparently, people on WordPress actually do read each other’s blogs.

Although Stealthmode’s blog and USHealthCrisis.com are build on WordPress.org, and optimized (or not) by me, I have some personal blogs on WordPress.com, including the one for my foundation, the Opportunity Through Entrepreneurship Foundation, my grandson’s blog, and my dog’s blog. Sunday morning shortly after New Year’s Day I woke up to a flurry of emails from WordPress, with the stats for all my WordPress.com blogs.

These stats weren’t presented as graphs and charts, but as pure, old-fashioned words. For the first time, I could understand my stats and what they meant. Some cool factoids: one of the four top search terms that sent people to my grandson’s blog was “big boy underpants.” (He’s two, and apparently my daughter is not alone in exploring this topic). For my dog’s blog, several of the posts that drew the most traffic were actually written years ago, and still draw traffic. WordPress advised me to explore those topics again.

I am obviously not interested in monetizing my dog’s blog, a fun diversion, or my grandson’s, a way of staying in touch with far-flung family. Still, it’s interesting to know how visitors, stats, and search terms work, and I will use these as examples in my upcoming entrepreneurship trainings.

For the foundation, these stats are invaluable, because of course we’d like to raise money for more programs for the disadvantaged. Now we know we have to blog more often, and do some optimizing of our posts for key search terms.

All this information came to me. I didn’t have to go anywhere to get it, and I didn’t have to know a thing about WordPress, blogging, or stats, That’s why I’m impressed, and I’m taking a moment to thank the team that figured out all the algorithms, devised all these email forms, and got them out on the second morning of the New Year. Thanks Andy, Joen, Martin, Zé, and Automattic for making my life easier.

Tagged as: Automattic, Blog, Publishers, Tools, Wordpress, Wordpress.com