That's right folks. My goal for 2008 is to drive enough traffic to the site to
receive one million page views. This article is a look back at January and a
pat on the back or a kick in the butt.
So, how did I do? To get one million page views you have to receive 83,333 page
views each month. Last year I showed 470,000 page impressions as measured by
Google Adsense. This year I am measuring the traffic by Google Analytics. I
think going forward that will be a more accurate measurement. Plus, it allows
me to not count certain ip addresses. So, if I am posting an article and making
sure all the links work, then it isn't counting those as page views. There is
no point in cheating on this goal.
40,200 Page Views in January
So, let's get to the numbers and see what they all mean and how I can improve.
Google is showing 22,738 visitors and 40,200 page views. Well, that is less
than half I need to reach my goal for this month. I would say that might be a
problem. But, I also know that as you begin to build a base those numbers will
begin to increase exponentially. For January I am not worried.
The visitors that come have spiked a couple of days over 1,000 visitors. I
attribute those spikes to Stumble traffic. It goes to prove that if you can get
an interesting article or photo onto Stumble, it can drive some serious traffic
your way.
Doubled My Referral Traffic and Direct Traffic
The second area of interest is where is the traffic coming from? If you
remember from December I was receiving 76% of my traffic from search engines,
17% from referring sites and the rest from Direct traffic. Check out my article
on my December traffic titled,
A Tale of Two Blogs. That article had a subtitle How You Can Rock
the House with Your Traffic. For January my goal was to get more
referral traffic. And I did. My search engine traffic increased compared to
December by 3,000 visitors. But, my referral visits more than doubled. I went
from 2,549 referrals in December to 6,242 referrals in January. Yahoo!
I am definitely heading in the right direction. One area I need to improve upon
is direct traffic. I should be sending out emails at least once a month,
probably once a week. That would help drive more direct traffic. But, still
even though I was laxed in that area, I still have doubled the amount of direct
traffic compared to December, from 914 to 1,796. Direct traffic represents 8%
of my visitors. For February, I am going to try to increase that to 10% by
being more proactive in sending out newsletters.
If you look at the chart below you can see that my page views were consistently
above 1,000 page views per day, with many spikes above 1,500 pages. I want to
see a spike above 3,000 in February. So, take a moment today and each of you
that read this article go read another 5 of my older articles. Who knows, you
might learn something that will be of profit to you.
My traffic slows down during the weekend. I can only assume that people are
coming to my site when they should be working. I think I can up these numbers
by sending out emails over the weekend. Then if people are at home or check up
on work issues maybe I can encourage them to stop by on the weekend when they
normally wouldn't.
One of the numbers that I did find interesting was the caption, 115 URLs were
viewed a total of 40,200 times. I have over 500 pages on my web site
now. That means just over 20% of the pages are viewed on any given month. I
guess I need to write better articles so there will be traffic all year long.
That number isn't really so bad. I know that most of my blog traffic is just
reading today's article. My landscape, C# and weightlifting articles are more
general information that is equally important and relevant today or next year.
Alexa Yesterday Ranking below 100,000 Many Days in January
My Alexa traffic is interesting. It has improved. I use Entrecard in that
respect. When you are advertising or accepting advertising, then businesses and
bloggers will use Alexa to check your real traffic. Well, as real traffic
measured by Alexa. I think you can have 2 sites that get the same traffic and
one will have an Alexa score of 50,000 and the other can have an Alexa score of
325,000. If you don't accept advertising your Alexa score won't be very good.
Because advertisers are the ones most likely to have the Alexa toolbar on their
web site.
But, enough with the ranting. I will drop my Entrecard on the Make Money Online
and Marketing category, because I assume that they are more likely to run the
Alexa toolbar. I don't know if that is a valid assumption or not. But, my
numbers for Alexa are improving. I also have been accepting advertising through
Project Wonderful and those advertisers are also running the Alexa toolbar.
The image below is a snapshot of the Alexa detail page on February 1st, 2008.
You can see my yesterday score is 75,976. Any time that number goes below
100,000 I am a very happy camper. When the weekly average also dips below
100,000 that is excellent. But, the real number that means something to
advertisers is the 3 month average. I will consider my hard work a success when
that number dips below the hundred thousand mark and stays there.
The Alexa one month graph looks very promising for the You Can Learn Series
website. I think if that graph line stays above the 0.002 line then I make my
goal of my monthly average below the 100,000 mark.
So, there it is. I have done some things right. All my numbers are moving in
the right direction. They aren't moving as fast as I want them too, but the
year is still young. I expect to continue to follow my plan, see the article on
Ten Things to Make Your Blog Successful in 2008 to see what I am
doing this year to drive traffic to my web site.
How Were Your Numbers in January?
I hope your numbers for the month are also improving. If you are looking for
tips on improving your traffic be sure and read,
Eight Blog Traffic Generators I can't Live Without. As always
you don't want to dwell too much on the past. You need to live today and
prepare for tomorrow. I am wishing you all an excellent February. Please take a
moment and comment on how your January numbers are looking. I always visit the
websites of my commenters.
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