Behind The Numbers: A Blogs First Month

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turndog

 

Last Thursday marked my Blog’s one-month anniversary and thus the first opportunity to analyse my efforts so far. Overall it’s been a pleasing experience to write this post as I feel my numbers are decent (without being spectacular) and the lessons learned so far have been great.

Total Views

My total views after one month were 640, which overall I’m really happy with. However, I must confess that this doesn’t mean visitors, as I’ve come to discover, rather the amount of pages, links, and posts viewed by you, the general public. This information is via the WordPress stats page, which although decent, hardly allows for a particular deep set of analysis.

So I went in search for services to help further my analysis, which is surprisingly hard with it being a WordPress.com Blog (WordPress.org Blogs can use Google analytics which is by far the most sensible option to use). I did come across two services though and decided to test them both for ten whole days.

The first service is Clicky, which is a great free tool and one I highly recommend. It delves into much more detail than WordPress stats and allowed me to venture into things further. My total actions/views during this period was 231, with 121 Unique Visitors and 109 New Visitors coming on by.

To clarify, New Visitor represents a person on their very first visit to my site. Therefore during ten days I had 109 complete strangers come to say ‘hello’. A Unique Visitor on the other hand represents every time a person comes to visit, including those who’ve been here before. Therefore I had 22 people revisit my site during those ten days.

With some rather quick maths I can assume that during my entire first month I had 330 new people come to my site, with around 65 of them returning at some point. Although far from spectacular, I’m overall pleased with this and it shows my content is at least interesting to some people J

The other site I used was Sitemeter, and although decent, I’ve decided to continue with Clicky because of the overall layout and feel. Considering I’ll be checking this site daily, I want to be able to navigate and find what I need with ease.

The Top 5 Pages & Posts

Unsurprisingly top of the list is the Home Page with 243 impressions. This is, in general, the first impression and how most people come to find my Blog. It just goes to show how important the Home Page is, doesn’t it?

In at number two is my post, ‘The Ever Improving Dream Of Writing’, which came away with 50 views. This is the post I used to enter the Men With Pens contest and shows what leaving a comment on a 3rd part Blog can do. I didn’t win the contest (the winners were really good by the way), but it was a great exercise and a very good traffic generator.

My number three post is my first in The Millionaire Plan: Author Marketing series. It racked up 42 views and I find this rather encouraging. Although I will admit it’s a little frustrating these people aren’t then reading further posts, but it’s all part of the learning process and getting to where I want to.

The number four spot goes to my Guest Post with Rick Chesler, who brought in a tidy 38 views. This doesn’t surprise me at all as Rick has a really nice support base and advertised it via his own Social Media channels.

And finally at number 5 is my ‘Winter Nightmare’ essay that I wrote as part of the AW January Blog Chain. This created 34 views as well as several comments, so demonstrates how involving yourself in a community is a great way to establish an author platform.

Where Are My Readers?

Good question, and despite being English my main visitors are from the United States of America (although London is my top city, so good Job England!). I only have data for the last ten days, but America accounts for well over half my views, only England, Australia, and Canada coming anywhere close.

This isn’t a worry though as we live in a very local and global world these days. It does make for interesting analysis however, especially when choosing marketing tools and how to distribute future projects.

How Do They Get Here?

In a recent article I discussed the importance of involving one’s self in Online Communities and getting to know Experts. I can assure you this is very important because without these tactics I’d have hardly any visitors at all.

Between my two Online Communities I’m part of (AW Forum & Goodreads) 170 referrals were generated. A further 50+ came via the way of 3rd party sites (such as fellow writers, marketing experts etc), the Men with Pens contest accounting for around half of these. My actual own Social Media sites such as Twitter and Stumbleupon only brought in around 20, which isn’t great considering the amount of time I spend on these medias.

I am confident this will improve with time, and it certainly doesn’t down play the importance of Social Media. What Social Media does not provide is an instant success. It takes a great deal of effort and time, so don’t get discouraged if it’s slow progress.

How long are they hanging around?

For the most part not long at all, the average time just 1 minute and 10 seconds. Go on, get the violin out, I know you want to. With a bounce rate of 53% (this is when someone stays on for 10 seconds or doesn’t click on a further page) it shows a lot of my visitors are not hanging around. However, there is a bright light at the end of this dismal tunnel.

Over 15% of my visitors stayed long enough to at least read an article or two, so although far from ideal it does show the support is gradually growing. Again, this data is only from the last ten days, so it will be interesting to see how February fares.

So there we have it, month number one over with and some stats to work to. These are hardly going to blow people away, but it’s a start and I feel I’m finally getting to grips with a few techniques and winning formulas. My next round of analysis is going to occur in the month of February where I’ll use Clicky as my primary tool, and the WordPress stats as a secondary source.

The main areas I wish to improve upon are:

–       Attracting more Unique Visitors to my site

–       Getting more Returning Visitors to my site

–       Improving my Bounce Rate and Average time

–       Getting more Comments (only three posts so far have resulted in comments)

There’s loads of room for improvement, but for the first month I’m quite pleased. Let’s hope February brings more joy, and it would be great to hit over 1,000 views 🙂

Turndog Millionaire – @turndog_million

What analytical sites do you use?

How did your first month of Blogging go?

Picture By gillicious

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