About four weeks ago, I decided to take the next step in blogging - regular posts, and actually monitoring traffic on the site.
Here are the lessons I have learned so far:
Traffic Stats
You do want traffic stats to see what is happening. You don’t want to parse them by hand, nor do you want to write your own tools. What you want is something like Mint, a brilliant web-based analyzer. Extensible through plugins, well-thought out - it’s a whole other article waiting to be written.
Without traffic stats, I would have been blind.
Traffic is hit driven
One page … 45% of traffic Of course, if you track traffic, you want traffic to track. For me, most of the traffic so far is driven by very few things - almost all centered around the Starbucks Challenge Map. I get traffic from greenlagirl, the originator of the Challenge, Googlemapsmania, a blog about google maps, and Mapki, a wiki about google maps. This dwarfs all the other pages - the map gets about 45% of my traffic.
The challenge here is converting that traffic into regular visitors, or even people who move on to your actual writing. I feel like I did a suboptimal job there, and am grateful for any suggestions you might have.
Luck matters
The next-biggest hit was something completely unexpected - I had written an article about Nintendo’s console strategy. For reasons unknown, this turned out to be quite a magnet. This single article drove 5% of the traffic, mostly through an aggregator I had never heard of before.
That aggregator is certainly on my ping-list now!
Luck is not repeatable
As a logical conclusion, a week later I published another console article about the XBox 360 launch, to much lower success. Obviously, something must have been different, but I’m not sure what. So don’t bank on repeating lucky hits.
Search Engines - Not So Much
Of the 2000 hits I’ve got so far, about 30 come from search engines. This might have a variety of reasons that I still have to look at. I certainly don’t “optimize” for search engines, so that might be one thing. Also, my blog is fairly new and doesn’t have many inbound links - both facts count against it in the search engine world.
The lesson learned: Search engines might be important one day - but right now, just getting inbound links (or - gasp! - a mention on a major site) seems more important. A single comment I left on lifehacker drove about half as much traffic as all search queries combined.
Don’t quit your day job
So far, I can afford a large coffee You know all the stories about the uber-rich pro bloggers? It took hard work for them to get there, and it’s harder now that there are already quite a few. At the start of my “blogging career”, I also added Google Ads to this site to see what they would do. So far, I can afford a large coffee. Well, maybe an extra large one. If I extrapolate from my numbers, I would need roughly 1.2 million visitors per month to live off this. Right now, I’m getting about 2500 per month, so there’s still some improvement necessary…
Watch this space the coming year - I will certainly try driving traffic here, and I intend to share the results with you.
Love writing
Writing an article every day off the week is not an easy task. I’ve been getting up every morning at 5am to have the time to write an article, search the web for new topics, and research blogging. I love writing, and still, there were some mornings where I just wanted to give up. If you’re in it only for the money, go home. Or prepare for really rough days.
Corollary: Sometimes, the muse just doesn’t love you. So when she does, it never hurts to prepare an article or two and stash them away. This way, you’ll have something even on the days where you’d rather crawl back into bed.
Keep On Keepin’ on
This whole thing is fun. Don’t let the traffic numbers discourage you - if you enjoy it, it’s more than worth it!
Tags: blog, traffic, problogging
Well, congrats on the decision
And welcome to serious blogging! Glad I’m sending some traffic your way!
As others much wiser than I have said, content is king.
Just keep producing good content, do it consistently and write with personality, and if you keep at it long enough, people will come.
Siel, Michael: Thanks for your encouraging words. I’ll definitely keep at it. Lots of plans for the next year. Hopefully, somebody will consider them quality content
Have a merry Christmas, and happy holidays!
After a long period of neglect I’ve been updating my blog on a more regular basis and keeping a closer eye on my stats. I noticed that most of my traffic is from search engines — from the CSS articles I published from 2002 to 2004. You’re running WordPress — so you might want to look at the Google Maps plugin.
I’m sure the link from problogger will help your traffic too.
I think that having a back catalogue of data certainly makes search more important. I started pretty much from scratch, with a total of 6 articles posted before, so Google hasn’t been to keen on indexing me.
Even then, most of the topics I write about are really well covered - so most of the time, I’m not exactly #1 on the results.. Part of 2006 is focussing this blog on a particular topic. I’m simply spread out too much to get consistent hits.
And yes, problogger helped immensely - for a few hours I’ve been seeing about 6 times regular traffic. It’s going to be interesting to see when it tapers off to normal levels. If it follows the same pattern as stevepavlina.com and googlemapsmania.com, it will be a couple of weeks before he’s completely vanished from the referrer list.
How do you eat an Elephant?
One bite at a time.
I found this post to be both helpful and encouraging. (And so you know, I found this through Google.)
1) Hey, you can always count on me to reply with a long-winded comment on your console posts! That should be reward enough.
2) Happy to bounce some traffic your way.