By the Numbers… February 2010
Autoblog does a monthly feature called by the numbers, outlining how the various automobile manufacturers have fared this month. ViperChill does something similar, offering a nearly transparent view to the traffic, subscribers, and keywords that keep people coming to the site. This is my take on the same, I will share with you all of my numbers, and exactly what I did to achieve those numbers. If you are following the blog, you know that I only started blogging at the beginning of February, so these numbers will be quite small, but I achieved the goals that I set for myself, write 10 posts (I did 11), and get people to come and stay for a bit (see graphs below.)
So lets take a look at the numbers for February…
As you can see, the breakdown goes like this:
- 182 Visits
- 1.72 Pages/Visit
- 1:09 Avg Time on Site
And these are the numbers that I care most about because they tell me how many people are coming, whether they are clicking through to other pages, and how long they are sticking around for. These numbers are VERY exciting for me, almost 200 visits in my first month? Yeah I’m stoked. I don’t know what “normal” is for first time bloggers, but I also don’t care, this is enough to keep me blogging, at least for a little while.
Now on to the Traffic Sources:
Top Contributing Sites:
- Direct 82 visits, 45.05%
- Third Tribe Marketing 39 visits (referral), 21.43%
- Facebook (referral) 17 visits, 9.34%
- Google (organic) 16 visits, 8.79%
- Sachachua.com (referral) 7 visits, 3.85%
These stats excite me as well, because it means that people are clicking through from OTHER sites that I post on. Third Tribe Marketing is a forum that I joined in an effort to grow my knowledge about “new” marketing, and I was fairly active at the beginning of the month, but slowed down towards the end, and Sachachua is just another blog that I made a comment on. I feel that if I can increase my activity elsewhere, more people will come here, which makes sense it is Social Networking after all.
Other Stats:
- Keywords that worked for me: Devon Jordan, gravity badges, “devon+jordan”
- Most viewed page (aside from home, which is where everything new gets published): Gravity
- Subscriber Stats: Went from 0 to 4, which is pretty low, and I could probably name each person who subscribes, but oh well.
So what did I do to get the above results?
- Engage in the Social Community elsewhere. This is a big step for most people to make, and its hard for me too. Sometimes I feel discouraged to comment somewhere, or post a question, or even challenge one of the “though leaders,” but I shouldn’t. The beauty of the internet is that everyone can have their own opinion, and can share that opinion globally. So long as professionalism and common courtesy is maintained, the worst that can happen is a DISCUSSION on opposing viewpoints, which is why Social Media exists.
- Communicate with the REAL WORLD. As you can see most of my traffic is direct, and I believe this is in part to my real world communications. I network with my group of friends, campus clubs, professors, and more. Each time I pass out that business card, I know that I have pushed another person to come and see what I am all about.
- Search Engine Optimization. In reality I did very little of this, and probably am banking on the previous version of my website for all the views I got organically. I am working on getting better, but for me it has to be easy to do it. Find out from Johnny B. Truant about the tool that I am now using for my SEO copywriting.
Glenn doesn’t have any goals for ViperChill, but I have to have goals for myself, its another way to keep me motiviated about what I am doing. So here they are for next month:
- Keep Writing- School is attacking me from all sides, so its hard to balance my Blog, Social Media Efforts, and Schoolwork. Usually the first thing to get cut is the blogging, but not this month. I hope to write a minimum of 3 posts per week this month, so 21 in total. Can I do it? We shall see.
- Engage More- This is both online and off, but I need to engage more with the people I read. I follow probably 100 other blogs, in all kinds of niches. What I don’t do often enough is comment on the content they are pushing out. I won’t comment when I have nothing to add to the discussion, and that’s not where my problem lies. It’s when I have something to add that I fail, and I can’t keep failing.
- SEO- With Scribe I should be able to get my SEO copywriting down pat, and start appearing organically for more than just Devon Jordan. The goal in this is to optimize each of my relevant posts to recieve maximum search engine benefit. When I say relevant, I mean relevant to Social Media, my Friday Comedy Breaks, or Music, posts won’t be optimized because they aren’t what I want to rank for.
- Numbers- As far as this goes I’d like to double up on everything. Twice as many visitors, staying twice as long, and capturing at least 8 subcribers this month.
So what do you think, can I do it? I think I can. If you have anymore tips for me to keep breaking out, share them in the comments, we would all love to hear them! If you’d like to know more about Google Analytics (what I use to keep track of all this info) go visit Phil’s blog…
