You are either in love with your website and blog stats, or you are not.  It is a fun score card that helps you know how you are doing. You should at least keep a passing interest in your website traffic and the direction the traffic is moving.

Most people look at the total traffic.  If that describes you, then here is a quick next step for you to understand what really matters.

Many sites, such as Digg, will create hordes of website traffic for you.  Sometimes in a very short period of time.

However, traffic is not that important.  Readers are more important.  So here are a few simple tips to find out what referral sites are producing the best readers.  This advice is specific to Google Analytics.

View the referral sites report in the left.  Then sort by pages/visit and average time on site. Do a wide enough timeframe to get referring sites that have generated more than one or two visitors.

By filtering on the different columns here, you can quickly find out which kinds of sites are producing readers instead of quick hit visitors.  Don’t include the sites that have only one or a few visitors.

Then put together a profile on the best blogs that will generate readers for you.

For example, I get high quality readers from:

• Blogcatalog - I never would have guessed this one, but a lot of people visit and read my blog after finding me here.  Probably to learn how to promote themselves online.
• MakeItGreat – This one does not surprise me.  Phil Gerbyshak has build a great, involved community.  The quality of his readers spills over to my blog when they follow a link.
• Selling To big Companies – While this blog produced steady traffic via a link, it flies under the radar unless I look at the reading habits of the visitors.  Then this is a winner.

There are many blogs that produce traffic for us.  Some of the most popular, like the 4 Hour Work Week and Guy Kawasaki produce steady traffic but poor readership.

My assessment is that my blog is best linked to via other blogs and websites that have a strong audience, but not a cult-like following.  The audience has to care about promoting themselves, promoting their blogs or improving sales leads.

(That is the assessment from the 20+ winners.  Not just the three examples I gave)

With that understanding, I am better equipped to produce a strong readership.

Since you are reading this, leave a comment and let me know what you think.  Am I dead on?