First Month Blog Stats, My One Month Anniversary

This blog went live on August 27th, and it has taken off better than I thought it would. Today would be a good day to talk about my blog, how I launched it and what my goals are, and of course to take a poke around my stats and see how I did and how I want to move forward from here.

Launching the Blog

If you look in the Archives you’ll see that I have posts dating back to August 22nd. I actually wrote almost a week’s worth of posts in one go and back dated them so that when I went live, there was a decent amount of content there for visitors to see.

The timing of the launch was quite important. In August I took part in the Thirty Day Challenge and this had a big impact on my decision to quit my job and start this business. As soon as I did that I knew that I wanted to blog about the journey and so I had to start right away. I also figured that a hyped up headline about the 30DC and quitting my job might get people’s attention.

It did :-)

The top post on launch day was “The Thirty Day Challenge and How it Affected my Decision to Quit my Job“. The first place I posted this was in the 30DC forums and at that time the forums were heaving because we were just days away from the challenge closing and the excitement of people trying to get that first $10 before the end of the month was overwhelming. So when I posted this I got a nice surge of traffic directly from the forums.

I also twittered my post and posted a link on Facebook – this soon became a habit for me for all my main posts. For the first week or so the posts focused on the 30DC and I talked about some of my results which seemed to attract many challengers to the blog. Still one month on, the bulk of my readership are challengers. Let’s look at some stats.

RSS Readers

My number one goal with this blog is to gain RSS readers and I’ve done a few things to make it really easy for people to sign up. Here’s the growth:

The highest number is 132, today I currently sit at 125 subscribers. Good enough for one month, not good enough to display the feed count widget in my side bar :-) The one thing that I find encouraging about this chart is that for the most part is shows a fairly steady growth though it has stagnated a bit in the last week or so.

Traffic Stats

Over 4000 visitors with just over 3000 being unique. That’s not bad. Notice how spiky my traffic is? Every one of those spikes is caused by a particular article getting Stumbled and bringing in a mini surge in traffic. Unfortunately as you can see those spikes were temporary and they also didn’t have any effect on RSS numbers.

Traffic Sources

So where did all that traffic come from?

Less than 3% of my traffic has come from search engines! Is that good or bad? Well that tells me that there is certainly room for improvement there. Obviously the majority of the traffic has come from the referring sites. Let’s take a look at what those were:

Ooh some interesting stats there! 36% of my traffic came from StumbleUpon – that’s a big chunk! However as I said, I don’t think it did me much good in the long run.

Here’s what I find interesting – Thirty Day Challenge (19%), Twitter (8%), Facebook (7%) and Bloglines (3%) – these are all a direct result of the 30DC! Really this whole blog has been launched off the back of the 30DC but it goes to show that Ed Dale really does know what he’s talking about! A large chunk of my Facebook friends and Twitter followers have come from the 30DC and through those sites they have come to this blog which is really cool.

Oh and look at number 8 – one post from Ed Dale’s blog and I get over 100 visitors!

Most Popular Posts

Here’s the report of my top 10 most viewed pages:

My interview with Caro is the top post! See you’re famous now :-) What I find interesting about this is the difference between what I think will be popular and what is actually popular. Number 2 there was just a fairly short post about timing posts to make sure they get indexed by Google. Somebody else submitted it to StumbleUpon and it became really popular and yet I didn’t think much of it at all.

My Failed LinkBait Attempts

I’ve read quite a few stories of bloggers who have had massive success very quickly and every time it has been due to one or two articles or unique features that have suddenly taken off virally within social media or have caught the attention of a high traffic blog. I keep reading about link bait and though I personally don’t like those top-n lists I tried a couple myself. They all failed quite spectacularly! The only one that is even in my top 10 is the 512 ways to make money online post. I like that post, took me hours to write! Shame, oh well :)

Where do I go From Here?

In this first month I really just grabbed the opportunity to grab some of the traffic that was pouring from the 30DC and didn’t really think too far ahead. Now that that traffic that settled down I need to really start pushing this blog forward on it’s own steam if it is to survive.

Making Myself Known

I already posted about this in my post about blog commenting and this is something I have been doing every day all week. It’s a slow process but its rewarding because I feel like I am getting to know the other bloggers a bit better and have even had one of two emails from some of them which is nice.

I read an article recently by Yaro Starak about traffic building for blogs and it really struck a chord with me. The point that he makes is that established bloggers can just pump out great content and they don’t have to do much else because their existing audience spreads the word for them and their success continues to escalate. For the new blogger like myself, I don’t have that luxury – I have to get out there and work to become known. I have to tell people who I am because they aren’t going to just find me all by themselves.

Expanding my Reach

So far this blog has been hugely focused on the Thirty Day Challenge and whilst that was great for the first month, there is more to Internet Marketing than just those techniques. In some of my recent posts such as yesterday’s cross linking strategy, I have tried to make the post more generic so that it can appeal to a wider audience. Expect to see more posts like this in the future.

Monetization, or Lack Thereof

You may have noticed that this blog is not monetized in any way. Well I think I may have dropped one or two affiliate links in a post or two but that’s it. There’s no Adsense, there’s no banner ads, no sponsored links, yada yada. My top commentator Peter, actually sent me an email recently full of concern that I didn’t appear to be making money with this blog. Aww how sweet :-)

See the thing is, I intend to make money online, but this blog is not part of that strategy. This blog is the means by which I can communicate my story along that path. I find it ludicrous when I see another blog about making money online and the only thing they write about it how they intend to make money with that very blog, and of course they aren’t making any money so they have nothing to blog about!

For now, I want to tell my story, that is all.

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