In 2009 one of my goals was to do 100,000 visits in one month. I had no idea how I could do it, and I didn’t reach that goal until the end of the year.
For 2010 I set a goal of getting 250,000 visits per month. I also had no idea how I could pull this off, but as of today, I did:
This was a huge surprise. I have no idea if I can keep up the pace or not, let alone grow, but I did it.
Something very odd has happened this month. I don’t know why.
On January 4, my search engine traffic increased by about 40%. I have no idea why. I have done nothing that I know of that would have increased traffic. I’m still a long way from my 2010 goal, but it is a nice bump considering I didn’t have to do a thing to get it.
On January 18 I had my largest traffic day every. Nothing unusual happened to cause the traffic boost. Since I hit that one day traffic record, I’ve been above that level every single day. Getting raw traffic was the hardest of my 2009 goals, but it looks like I’ll hit 150,000 visits and 250,000 pageviews in January and be on a run rate for 180,000 visits in a 30 day period. Crazy. In fact, in the last week I had 51,000 visits, which is more than I had in an entire month just as late as September.
So, I’m riding a nice wave at the moment, and I just need to keep it going.
Here are my 2010 blog goals.
My social media traffic has vastly outpaced my search engine traffic. I need to rectify this. This would be about a 10x increase in my daily Google traffic. This will mean publishing more content and better SEO. Google traffic requires more upfront work, but it can go on autopilot once you do it. Social media traffic is an every day thing and it gets tiring after a while.
2009 was about Twitter. 2010 will be about Facebook. I get better a better response per fan on Facebook than I do on Twitter. If current trends continue, I should reach 4,000 fans at the end of 2010. I’ll need to double my rate of growth to hit 10,000. I might totally change my Twitter strategy in 2010. We’ll see how that goes.
As always, subscribers is key. I’m at about 5,000 at the end of 2009. This will require more than a doubling in 2010, which is a slower rate of growth than I had in 2009.
I don’t really care about PR per se, but PR6 would be a reflection of getting noticed in more higher profile publications. Unlike the other goals, I can’t really do much about this as it is in the hands of Google.
This goal isn’t as quantifiable, but I want to start working with larger media players with my content, in particular my photos.
This is going to be a huge priority for me in 2010. I haven’t done much to monetize my site as of yet. If I can reach a break even point where it can cover my travel costs, I should be able to do this indefinitely.
This is another big stretch. I’m at 110,000 per month right now and I’ve exhausted StumbleUpon and Twitter as sources of traffic. If I hit my search engine goals, it still wouldn’t be enough.
This is a big change in direction for me. You’ll see more when I publish some.
I set several goals for 2009 with my blog. I achieved most of them and the one I didn’t achieve was more a matter of not having enough time. Here were the goals I set out and where I am now:
I made the 5,000 subscriber goal, even if I don’t include the inflated Feedburner numbers from Friendfeed. I have just over 5,000 with email and RSS subscribers.
The 7,500 Twitter follower goal was crushed long ago.
This Week in Travel has now gone 18 episodes and we are getting a lot of good feedback on the show.
I have contacted a publisher about a book, but haven’t had the time to pursue it. All my other goals have help my cause when I wish to pursue it, however. I might work on this in 2010.
The big goal that I didn’t know if I could do was the 100,000 visits per month. I did that in November. I’m at a 30 day run rate of 115,000 as of right now and might hit 120,000 in December. I’ll certainly stay above 100,000 for the foreseeable future (I hope).
My 2010 goals are going to be of a totally different. I haven’t finished a list yet, but I know they will deal more with Facebook, search traffic, and monetization.
The last three months have brought about a lot of changes. I’ve come back to the United States, launched a new travel podcast, and have started a two month road trip through the American west.
The goals I set out for 2009 were as follows:
Goal #1 is on track. If you look at my Feedburner numbers it is over 9,000 but that is mostly due to them adding FriendFeed numbers. If you substract the non-FriendFeed numbers, I’m still on track to easily get 5,000 by the end of the year. The RSS + email newsletter numbers are around 4,300 but I haven’t actually checked lately. With three months to go, I’m pretty confident about this.
Goal #2 has been demolished. Not much more to say about this. I have been putting more effort into Facebook than Twitter lately. Facebook is showing a higher rate of response from readers than Twitter. I think Facebook will be in my 2010 goals and Twitter will not.
Goal #3 is looking better but might still be difficult. This was always a long shot, but things have improved greatly in the last few months. In September I had 64,000 visits to my site and over 105,000 pageviews. 75,000 visits per month is easily in reach. Getting to 100,000 in December might require something I haven’t thought of yet. I am making some big changes, but I don’t know if they will kick in, in time. My Alexa and Complete rank should be below 50,000 when the dust settles. See below.
Goal #4 is in holding. I’m still going to do it, but I’ve been occupied with other things.
Goal #5 was achieved, but not in the way I thought. I launched This Week in Travel which is a podcast, and it is released in a consistent manner and is quasi professional. I was thinking in terms of something with video and about my travels when I made the goal. Nonetheless, I’m call it a win.
You may notice that none of my goals have dealt with money. I haven’t made monetizing the site a huge priority. I’ve been working on gathering an audience more than trying to make money off the site. The theory being that if you have an audience, you can always make money. Well, that time is now.
One problem I’m having is trying to get work done when I move every other day. It doesn’t lend itself to productivity. I’m going to take the first few months of 2010 and get an apartment, probably somewhere like Bangkok and work. I’m working on several new projects:
1) A massive SEO overhaul of my site. Most people who are regular visitors to Everything-Everywhere.com will not notice a thing. Currently, my navigation to all the places I’ve been is just linking to the category page in WordPress. This is horrible. I’m creating landing pages with all the content I’ve created for each country, city and attraction. I have a list of over 250 already. I’m also going back and working on my internal links for all these landing pages. This is something I’ve never done, so I’ve never really harnessed the power of my content. I’ll be putting ads on the landing pages and not on the front page of the site. This should dramatically increase my targeted search engine traffic.
2) Finish the move to Smugmug. I’ve removed (as far as I know) all the links to images on my self hosted photo site. I’ve also mapped my own domain to my Smugmug accounts (TravelPhotos.Everything-Everywhere.com) The next step is to remove all the Flick links from the blog. Once that is done, every photo on my site will be hosted under my own domain. I will also then work on reorganizing my photos into better sets and changing the layout of my photo page. I’m getting more traffic from Google Image search already and that should increase dramatically once this is all done.
3) I’m launching a new blog. I’ve been thinking about launching a multi-author blog but I didn’t just want to copy what other sites are doing. I thought about how I as an independent blogger would want to work with a multi-author blog and have come up with some unique things which should make it compelling to every independent travel blogger. If successful, it will drive traffic to their sites.
It will be interesting to see how the next three months pan out. I have a lot of work to do, but I’m moving in the right direction.