2009 Traffic Data – A Case Study
Here are the unofficial traffic stats for the past 12 months. I say ‘unofficial’ because these numbers
Source: pixelsandpills.com
probably include some of my own admin page hits, as well as search engine robots, spiders and the like (although those are all supposedly filtered out to some degree). The information is compiled from three different traffic analysis programs: AwStats, Cystats and Mystat.
Total Unique Visitors: 8,574*
Total Number of Visits: 23,749
Total Pageviews: 64,711
Best Month: May – 2,292 unique visitors; 4,333 Visits
Top Traffic Sources:
Rantlister.com – 1,513
StumbleUpon – 1,333
Google Images – 1,165
Google Search – 910
Various Blog Comments – approximately 500
Various Forums – approximately 500
Yahoo! Search – 154
Bing Search & Images – 129
Facebook/Twitter – approx 100
Current Alexa Rank: 340,949; In the United States: 69,908
*Unique Visitors are counted monthly and reset at the start of each month – so in theory someone who viewed this site one time in each month would account for 12 unique visitors by years end.
So what does all this mean?
In the overall scheme of things, not all that much. There are a lot of sites that get more traffic in a day than this one gets in a year. That said, there are a few things that I’ve learned along the way that may be beneficial to some other aspiring bloggers out there.
I published 61 posts last year – or about one every six days. This does not take into account the fact that I didn’t post anything for about 80 days from July to September. Considering that, I posted approximately once every four and a half days.
In the month of May this site received by far the most traffic. I published 10 posts during that time.
During that month, this site received 362 visitors via Stumble Upon; 290 from Rantlister, a syndicate that updates their blog weekly with links to all new posts from the sites in their network; and 229 from a message board where I had been a frequent contributor.
Although I have no way to determine which posts were the most popular, I do know that the ones that were the most likely to go viral by means of Stumble Upon, etc. were the ones that centered around mocking organized religion, current events, or feces. Apparently, poop is still as popular as ever.
The Craigslist ads, from all I can gather, were among the favorites and I am going to try to create more of them in the next year.
I did a shitty job of promoting through Facebook and Twitter.
One of the goals I had at this time last year was to see if I could build a steady audience. I was doing quite well until a job opportunity came along that monopolized a lot of my time. I am pretty sure the traffic numbers would have continued their ascent had I been able to sustain the 10+ posts/month pace I had established, as well as duplicating the efforts I had made in reaching out to like-minded bloggers and posting in appropriate forums and such.
My intention wasn’t to make money from this site, so I’ve really never had that as motivation. The fact that traffic has grown and sustained the way that it has tells me that people are interested in my work, even if it is nothing more than a momentary diversion.
Some things I’ve learned:
- Posting frequency matters. Writing three posts in a week then staying silent for the next month is not productive when trying to build an audience.
- Choosing topics that are in current events is helpful. in April, No one cares about who won the Super Bowl.
- Try to use images whenever possible. Not only do they make your articles more enjoyable to read, they’re also a decent magnet for traffic.
- Networking, networking, networking. You can’t build an audience on your own. Finding like-minded bloggers will definitely speed up the process.
- Commenting on others’ blogs and participating in forum discussions is beneficial and worthwhile.
- Everyone enjoys a good shit story once and again.
I wish I could set concrete goals for this site, but the reality is that with all of the business endeavors I am about to undertake, along with my current obligations, it’s hard to make it a priority. I am going to try hard to post more consistently, and more often.
But other than that, besides traffic numbers, there really isn’t a metric to gauge the growth of this site, since monetary gain isn’t in the equation. That said, I do have a few milestones I’d like to reach for the coming year:
- 20,000 Unique Visitors
- 100,000 Pageviews
- 1000 Twitter Followers
- 300 Facebook Friends
- Sub 200,000 Rank on Alexa.com
Finally, I just wanted to say thanks to those who have been faithfully reading my nonsense over the years and hopefully I can continue the buffoonery that you have come to expect from this site.
