Yesterday I wrote that you should be thinking of your blog or site as a hotel. Today I’m going to expand a little bit.

It’s important to know what kind of hotel your blog is because of expectations; the expectations of both you and your guests. If you’ve been putting out a continental breakfast every day and no one has eaten anything from it for the last four years, you would want to know, right? Similarly, if you’ve been putting a lot of time into creating content for a part of your site that no one has clicked on in weeks or months, you’d want to know, right? Once you arm yourself with the knowledge that something you are providing isn’t being used, you can either stop offering breakfast every day or you can put a big sign that reads “CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST” with an arrow in the lobby. To the same effect, you can put a link in your header or write a blog post about your super awesoe section of your site that no one visits.

It’s also important to know what kind of hotel you’re running so you can manage your own expectations. Jen Sadler had an interesting description of her blog:

My blog is like an aging motor inn in a remote small town: poorly maintained with tacky decor, long overdue for an update, and seldom sees any visitors besides the nuisances who come by on a regular basis peddling sex and cheap drugs.

Aside form the fact that her description is awesome, it paints an accurate picture of what it’s like to be fending off spam in the real world. Nianya described her blog as

my blog is a safe house for parents of special needs children; meant to provide support, information and great links

which gives me an idea of what her content and her guests are.

Your Digital Front Desk
If you haven’t signed up for a service that will tell you who is visiting your site, you should. I personally use Google Analytics and Lijit to measure my visitors. Lijit replaces the search feature at the bottom of the page with a customized search, but it also provides me with accurate numbers of guests to the site. There’s also Get Clicky, Site Meter, Woopra, Wordpress Stats and others. It tells me how many people have come to robblatt.com, how many pages they looked at etc. It was one of the reasons I decided to focus on my blog content. I also didn’t want to run anything besides a nice motel because I have so many other podcasts and sites I maintain.

If you didn’t answer yesterday, what kind of hotel are you running with your blog or website?

photo comes from heartonastickvia Flickr