A Tale of Two Blogs

Something I've never mentioned here is that I look at Google Analytics almost every day to find out how much traffic my blogs had the previous day. I've been doing this almost the entire time I've had my first blog, The Accidental Athlete. When I created this blog, I looked at the stats for it from the beginning. I won't go into all the reasons I do this—they're not relevant to the point of this post. What I will say is that there's been a trend with Freelance Writing Adventures lately. The traffic to the site is down 9.54%. I'm going to talk about this today, even though I'm breaking one of the cardinal rules of blogging, which is "don't blog about blogging."

The decline in traffic bothers me a little, not because I'm so vain that I want everyone to read my blog, but because one of the things I'm trying with my clients is increase traffic to their Web sites. I want to learn from my personal failings so I can help my clients succeed. So I've been analyzing the situation, trying to figure out where this blog is deficient. To do this, I've attempted to compare it with my other blog, which incidentally has an 18.82% increase in traffic. Here are the similarities:

1. They're both written by me and, therefore, have essentially the same caliber of writing.
2. They're both updated with the same approximate frequency. Since the end of November, my blogging hasn't been as regular as I had intended. However, that's been true with both blogs. For example, I got so busy I didn't update this blog yesterday, but I didn't update The Accidental Athlete either. There is an occasional weekend post on the Accidental Athlete, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

The differences:

1. The subject matter is obviously different. Here I write about my trials and tribulations as a freelance writer. I attempt to give advice stemming from the things I have learned in my relatively short stint in the profession. My other blog is about mountain bike and cyclocross racing and training. It's peppered with occasional bits about my struggle to lose weight/get healthy and random bike-related things.
2. There is no photography in this blog, whereas there used to be some in my other blog. Since my point-and-shoot camera died in November, I have been reluctant to lug with husband's digital SLR around, so there's been a dearth of pictures.
3. The Accidental Athlete tends to be more emotional in nature. I think I express more frustration, elation and other emotions because riding and racing are something I'm passionate about, but also something that completely disappoints me sometimes. Although I very much love what I do for a living, I'm not sure that comes through in this blog since I don't think I'm totally committed to the freelance way of doing things. And although I seldom question quitting the day job that was making me miserable (which was the catalyst for beginning a freelance career), I sometimes question whether it's the right thing for me.

In the end, I'm not sure I came to any conclusions from my analysis. I think it may just be that this blog is boring. Of course, I realize I'm now opening myself up to my four readers to do a critique of this blog, but I guess that's part of the point of beginning this discourse. So fire away.