Back in December I set out some goals for my travel blog for 2009. This is what they were:
- 5,000 RSS subscribers. (5x increase)
- 7,500 Twitter Followers (2.5x increase)
- Average 100,000 visits per month (5x increase)
- Have a book published
- Get my podcast on a regular schedule and done in a quasi professional manner
The Twitter goal has been smashed, crushed and otherwise made a fool of. Instead of 7,500 I’ll probably end up with over 100,000. While having a lot of followers is good, it isn’t quite as great as everyone might think. That is another post however.
I am on pace for 5,000 subscribers by the end of the year. As of May 31 I had 3,115. The progression has been interesting. I hit the 1,000 subscriber mark on December 31. I hit the 2,000 mark on April 28, and the 3,000 mark on May 30. That is almost 1,000 subscribers is a month which is really surprising. This came mostly from two sources. A contest with PVPonline and a mention in an article for Digital Photography School. The take away from this is pretty simple: getting mentions on large, popular websites dwarfs pretty much anything else you can do for marketing. Period. This is something everyone intuitively knows but people seldom talk about. I should also note that I got a fair amount of traffic and subscribers from a mention in an MSNBC.com article in April as well. All three of those sources are outside of the travel niche, which pretty much confirms what I think about where you need to generate traffic from.
I had a huge spike in traffic in May. In terms of raw traffic, I had 40,000 visits in May which much more than the previous high in April of 25,000. I wont be surprised if I fail in this goal. Subscribers are cumulative, traffic is not. I’ll need some big media mentions to hit that goal. Once I’m in the US that could happen, but I can’t plan on it. I’m not sure that Google is going to be the answer to achieving this goal either.
No news on the podcast front and I don’t think I’ll be doing anything with it until the fall.
The book outline is something together. I need to start contacting agents, which will help once I’m back in the US.
