I Will Not Die

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Overview

I say “ish” because I officially inaugurated this blog on April 13, 2008 by writing about goals. After another short post, I went on to write about a seven-day fast I experimented with, and I wrote just one post in all of May as I continued to develop the code behind the site. The real fun started in June.

There are at least two reasons why I decided to write a post on how this blog is performing:

1. Very few blogs are transparent about their performance, and
2. I think being transparent might actually be helpful for future performance

I sometimes look around for other blogs that openly talk about their performance, but only much larger blogs seem to post about it. Granted, I know many bloggers who don’t blog for performance, they blog for very personal reasons, so as I talk about blogs and their performances, keep in mind that I’m only referring to blogs whose authors’ aims are to make them widely trafficked. But even still, even among blogs who aim to grow, scant few say how they’re doing. I think one reason why is pretty clear (because it occurred to me when I decided to write this): if a blog isn’t huge yet, it can feel a little embarrassing. It’s like talking in a weight room about your 65-pound bench press.

However, I think that even though this blog isn’t stellar when it comes to traffic, it’s much better than millions of blogs out there, and it’s just a few months, really just a couple of months, old. Considering that most of my adult life has been spent with my nose in books and not in front of a computer screen surfing the web, I feel like I’m doing pretty well. In fact, there are only about 300,000 web sites in the world (only some of which are blogs) that receive more traffic than this blog does now. And there are 70 million blogs. And that data is over a year old.

If other bloggers come across this post while looking for what I sometimes look for, I hope they find it useful. But besides all that, I think being transparent about performance can help future performance. For starters, it’s a way to show your readers that you are serious about writing and, if you’re like me and you can demonstrate some significant growth, it can be one way of telling your readers that they are part of a site that is doing something right. In other words, it can lend a lot of credibility.

Traffic

Being pretty much a newbie when I started this blog, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I tried to imagine just how much traffic I would get. While reading up on blogging, I found one blog that got a hundred thousand page views in its first month. But don’t get too excited, because I’m a bit short of that

During the months of June and July, I received just over 15,000 unique visitors and over 22,000 page views.

Besides direct traffic (when someone types the URL directly, or has the site either bookmarked or in their browser’s history), and not including traffic that came from search engines, here are the top ten sites where I received traffic from (I wanted to list them to express my appreciation):

1. Reddit.com - A social bookmarking site where users can submit articles then vote on them.
2. Stumbleupon.com - Another social bookmarking site, but this one is where users are taken to a random page, where they vote the site “thumbs up” or “down”, gladiator style.
3. On.net.mk - This is a site about. Um. I’m not sure. I had to do some research on it, because even the all powerful google translator doesn’t support Macedonian. Yes, you heard that correctly. Macedonian. Think Alexander the Great, that place. This site must be some kind of major news outlet like a Yahoo over there because after they posted a link to Why people don’t like smart people this site got slaughtered for over twenty-four hours.
4. Totalfark.com - Another social bookmarking site. I don’t know much about it because it requires a small monthly fee to see the full extent of the site.
5. Lifereboot.com - After Shaun at Lifereboot posted a guest article I wrote him about liferebooting, I got fairly significant traffic from his site. In fact, I still get several hits a day, even now. I am grateful, Shaun.
6. Freedomcrowsnest.org - This is a forum in which my “Smart People” articles came to topic.
7. Bannination.com - This site features an area where articles can get voted on, and potentially go to their front page (much like Digg, etc.)
8. Inspiredmoneymaker.com - One of my articles was featured in a blog carnival here some time ago. I still get the occasional hit from them.
9. Persistentillusion.wordpress.com - This is Hayden’s site. She has been a regular reader here, and I, a reader of her blog. She put me on her blogroll and ever since then, I’ve gotten traffic from her site, usually daily. She also (as of this post) holds the honor of being the most active commenter. Thanks Hayden.
10. Improvedlife.ca - The author of Improvedlife.ca was kind enough to include an article of mine in a blog carnival there. I was also fortunate to talk to him a few times. He’s amazing when it comes to personal finance. Amazing.

All in all, I received:

• Over 9,000 pageviews in June, and
• Over 11,000 pageviews in July

This was a 15.7% increase month over month. Though August so far has seen much heavier traffic than the beginnings of either June or July, without the social bookmarking sites, beating July will be tough. Looks like I’ve got some writing to do

The last thing I’ll mention about traffic is my Alexa rank. I’m proud to say that I “showed up” on their graph in June. What’s neat about that is that your site won’t even get a graph on there until you breach the top 100,000 sites, even if for only briefly. The rest of the time, the graph just says “Not in the top 100,000.” The vast majority of sites out there are not graphed.

Revenue

I’m terribly weak here, which is good, because my focus has been on content so far. At some point I might try to monetize the site more, but my only real priority is writing. The two sources of income have been Google Adsense, and Kontera content links, though Kontera hasn’t been on the site for the full two months. I have a really, really bad click-through rate with the Google ads, but, like I said, I’m not really concerned about it at the moment.

From those two sources, I’ve been able to finance several vacations in Europe and a sport’s car. Yuh-huh.

Ok fine, not really. In fact, I don’t even currently make enough to cover the hosting fees for the site. June & July: $8.93.

RSS Feed Subscribers

I’m very pleased with the number of rss subscribers I’ve gotten. I hope that making the feed fully syndicated has contributed to the growth. In the beginning of June, the number of subscribers was….wait for it…wait for it….2.

But by July it was 32, then by August it was 69. That’s pretty good growth. From June to July it went up by over 115%.

If you’re a reader of mine who is unfamiliar with what rss feeds are, you can read about it here, or watch a very helpful video here.

One last thing: I want to thank everyone who has enjoyed my writing, and I’m very thankful for all the wonderful people I’ve met so far since I began blogging.

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Dereck :: Aug.06.2008 :: Site Related :: 9 Comments »

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