Okay, it’s been 3 months since my blog turned two years old. Each time I hit an annual landmark, I recapped the previous year’s accomplishments. This last birthday though I actually wrote down goals/predictions. Here’s what I put:

• 550 posts (that’s a post an a half every day… I want to hit 1000 posts by the end of year three)
• 1500 comments (I had twice as many comments as posts last year, so let’s see if I can triple it this year)
• 50,000 Unique Visitor (This should be doable, but we’ll see)
• 100,000 Page Views (This will be a bit of a stretch, but very possible)

So, three months in, lets see where I am at:

• 171 posts so far this year. At this rate I’ll author almost 700 posts smashing my 1000 posts by the end of year three goal. This takes some pressure off if things get busy or something.
• 417 comments so far this year. At this rate I’ll reach over 1600 comments which is just a little over my goal. Not bad.
• 7,089 Unique Visitors. At this rate I’ll be only a little over half way to my goal. I may have bit off more than I can chew. I do expect growth, but some amazing things will have to happen to make this goal.
• 19,556 page views. A this rate I’m not going to fall about 20,000 page views short. However, I’m expecting growth and I still think I’m going to get really close.

What’s the point. Whether 10 people visited my site or 10 million doesn’t really matter. I’m glad to share the information, ideas and my passion with others but the significance of this site isn’t the point. Tracking your progress is.

Do you set goals for your ministry each year? Do you write them down? Do you look at them regularly? Do you assess where you are mid year and make adjustments? You should. You really should. What you do this you learn an interesting balance of writing challenging goals that are pretty out there but still possible to achieve and learning how hard you have to bust your butt to achieve that goal you set.

Last week I heard Jim Wideman say, “you’re not going to lose any weight if you don’t get ont he scales every day.” Isn’t that the truth. Although it may be painful to look at, tracking our progress on a regular basis is the only way we’ll hit our goals.

If you’re like me, you like to know that people are visiting your blog. It’s super easy to put hit counters on your site and many of the blogging software options come with simple reporting plug-ins that tell you how many hits you’ve gotten in a day, week or month. But know this, none compare to Google Analytics. Really, none do.

My friend who used to work for a software developer was primarily responsible for SEO (search engine optimization). Basically it was his job to drive people to their company web site. He used software that tracked the people who came to his web site, how they got there, what they did while they were there (including what they eventually purchased). He told me he paid $500 a month for this service. That was until Google came along and bought the service, re-branded it and made it free. Google Analytics works seamlessly with AdSense which is how Google makes all their money, so they wanted to put this powerful software into the hands of anyone who might want to sell advertising through Google.

Just go to Google Analytics and create an account (if you have a Gmail account, that username and password will work). Once you set up your Analytics account, they’ll give you a code that you can insert into every page on your web site that you want tracked. If you’re using wordpress or blogger, you can get plug-ins that do this for you. Then after about a day you can begin seeing all kinds of interesting things such as what country, state and city your viewers are from, how many actual visitors you have, how they got there, how long they stayed, how many pages they viewed, which pages are the most popular, what operating system, browser and Internet connection they have. All of that is just the tip of the iceberg. So, give it a try, it won’t take long to set it up and you’ll enjoy the results.

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