A few weeks ago, an author friend of mine was preparing a proposal for his new book. He called to ask me what social media stats he should include. In other words, what would be meaningful to prospective publishers? This is a great question.

Agents and publishers are looking for authors with meaningful platforms. Most look at specific social media stats as a proxy for this. These stats include those specifically related to blogging, Facebook, and Twitter.

In the last 30 days, I have seen my blog traffic jump by 81.3%. I have seen steady growth since I converted from TypePad to self-hosted WordPress two years ago (up 338.6%). But the last 30 days represented the largest single jump in my traffic ever.

I want to share why I believe this has happened, so that you can apply what I have learned to your own blog. Hopefully, you will experience similar results.

About three weeks ago, my blog was dropped from Google’s search index. It had a significant negative impact on my site’s traffic and on my Google PageRank. I thought it might be helpful to document what I have learned so far in case this ever happens to you.

This morning, I was reviewing my traffic statistics for the month of October. Based on the data from my Google Analytics account, here were my top, most-read posts. It is interesting that only half of these were new posts written during the month. The remainder came from my archives.