What Aristotle Has to Say About Stats and Subscribers

Aristotle contemplating the Bust of Homer, by Rembrandt

The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC — 322 BC) believed that happiness did not lie in honor.

Why? Because only others can give it, and only others can take it away.

I think this philosophy can readily apply to bloggers and webmasters. We tend to gauge our success by statistics and subscribers. When they go up, we feel elated. When they go down, we feel distressed, and wonder what we’re doing wrong.

To have our happiness and sense of achievement pushed and pulled on a day-to-day basis is quite a stressful state of being. If you benchmark your success on reaching subscriber targets, or breaking a certain ceiling of unique visitors per day, you’re bound never to feel consistently fulfilled. Some days traffic will be abysmal. On others, your subscriber count will drop.

Why should numbers hold so much importance when they actually matter so little?

They’re not useful to us. They represent growth, but they say nothing of how it was achieved. Instead of orienting your goals at numbers, why not orient your goals at the actions that produce them?

For example, instead of aiming for 500 subscribers by the end of the month, write up a list of actions you think would be needed to achieve that. Guest-post, write an article each day, comment on 5 different blogs each day, write a link-bait article each week, and so on.

As you complete each action, you can check it off the list, and enjoy a different kind of happiness. The kind that rests squarely with you, and doesn’t surge up and down depending on the whims of a crowd.

When stats are useful, and when they’re not

Statistics are useful for approximating the results of your actions. If something you did brought in an influx of targeted visitors, it’d probably be wise to do it again.

However, I know of many bloggers and webmasters (and I used to be one of them) who check stats repeatedly throughout the day. The habit is at its worst in the first few weeks of your site, when each new visitor is a milestone.

There are two problems with this: firstly, it’s a useless action. You can’t react to inbound traffic, unless you’re someone who likes to say “Thanks for the link” — and even so, you can probably wait until the evening to do that.

Secondly, it’s a time-sink. It might seem like you only take five minutes to check your stats and go through your inbound links, but if you check them ten times a day, that’s almost an hour wasted on an unproductive task. An hour that could have been spent generating new streams of traffic, rather than simply watching those you already have.

If you can limit yourself to checking stats and subscribers once a day, you’ll realize that you’re not missing out on anything, and gaining some important time. Once you get to that stage, you might realize that the intervals can be stretched, until you’re only checking stats once a week. After all, stats inevitably fluctuate from day to day, and its’ the long-term trends you’re looking for.

An increase in average uniques today doesn’t mean much — it could be lower tomorrow. If the average is higher this month than it was last month, however, you’re doing something right.