Categories
Blogging

October 2008 Traffic Summary

October set all sorts of records for me. Here are the numbers: (note: these are number for my travel blog, not this site:)

Visits 22,222
Pageviews 67,294
RSS 850
Pages per visit 3.03
Bounce Rate 64.37%
Time on Site 2:29

October crushed all my previous months. My high for visits was back in March when I had 13,935. My previous high for pageviews was last month with 29,466.

The astonishing thing in October, and I have no idea why this happened, is that the pages per visit and time on site has increased dramatically. Pages per visit had normally been under 2.0 with a peak of 2.53 last month. So, somewhere along the line, the quality of the traffic has increased.

Where did the October traffic come from?

1. stumbleupon.com 4,004
2. (direct) 3,904
3. google / organic 3,405
4. pvponline.com 3,263
5. reddit.com 2,025
6. google.com / referral 660
7. twitter.com 650
8. bloggerschoiceawards.com 431
9. images.google.com 408
10. yahoo 390

So, lots of traffic from StumbleUpon and Reddit, but also a ton of long tail referrals (421 total). I think this is just the maturing of a standard network effect of being around a long time. There was only two posts in October that I actively encouraged stumbles for, which is encouraging. That means users are stumbling my content without me doing anything.

70 different pages received at least one visit from StumbleUpon, with 34 pages getting over 25 visits, and 14 pages getting over 100 visits. That is a nice distribution. It means I’m not just getting a single spike for one article. The biggest article for Stumble traffic got 514 visits. The monthly bounce rate for StumbleUpon was a shocking 45%. (shockingly good)

Reddit drove about half the traffic of StumbleUpon, but it was much more erratic. Only 18 posts showed any sort of traffic, with almost all of that for 3 posts. One got 993 visits, with two others in the high 400’s. Nothing else got above 50. Reddit quality was very poor, with a 92% bounce rate and time on site of only 11 seconds. (Stumble traffic was over 1 min)

Whenever I get a link from PVP I get a big traffic spike. This month was no exception. Scott drove over 3,000 visits which was quality. After the link, my RSS subscribers shot up.

I put a big effort into Twitter promotion this month and it has paid off dramatically. My followers are now 1,870 and 650 visits came from Twitter in October. My Facebook page has also passed 150 fans.

My efforts to rank on Google for “travel around the world” has stalled at #21, but I also haven’t done much in the way of link building yet.

I am running a contest during November to encourage subscribers and backlinks. My goal is to get to 1,000 RSS subscribers by the end of the year. If the contest goes well, that could happen by the end of the month. I’d like to hit 1,500 subscribers by the time I get back to the US.

My friend Amy has agreed to help me do marketing as soon as she finishes her move from Minnesota to Texas. That should help a ton. I could drive more traffic from more social network sites if someone spent even a few minutes a day dedicated to it.

My Google Adsense PIN was finally sent to my parents house, and I have Adsense back up and running.

I am considering a weekly or biweekly newsletter, but haven’t taken any action yet. My concern is the amount of work I need to put into it. I think this may be the way I’ll go in the future just because the audience I want to target in the future probably isn’t RSS savvy.

I have also contacted Unique Blog Designs about doing a custom WordPress theme for my site. I think at this point that it would be worth the investment. I’m still dissatisfied with my layout.

I am expecting a dip in traffic in November, just because October was such a huge jump. I will also be publishing a 2009 calendar with Scott Kurtz of my “Skull Around the World” photos.

Oh, I’ll also be adding a top commenter plug-in to this site for those who want some link love.

Categories
General

Should it stay or should it go

I’ve slowly been getting rid of junk on my site. Mostly they have been widgets from blog networks. I have two left on my site and I think they are about to get the axe.

BlogCatalog
I already got rid of MyBlogLog. It drove about 3 visits per month. BlogCatalog is better, but not by much. In the last 30 days, BlogCatalog has delivered a whopping 22 visitors out of 22,000. Given the traffic it brings, is it worth the real estate it takes up on my site? Probably not. BlogCatalog, like MyBlogLog, is slowly getting filled up with junk websites and spam. 0.73 visits per day isn’t worth the extra time do download a widget for every user. I’m also guessing I’ll get just as much traffic without the widget.

Bloggers Choice Awards
I’ve already taken this off my site. I always felt bad begging for votes. I was hopping to use winning in 2008 as one more arrow in the quiver for getting a book deal. Win or lose, I wasn’t planning on putting a link up for 2009. The contest has no rules so it encourages gaming. I’m taking this one step further and am going to avoid participating in any sort of contest which requires readers to vote. If I’m going to spend goodwill amongst my readers, I’m going to do it for something more valuable like subscribing to RSS or putting in links. Also, it appears I can pretty much stay on page one for travel without having to put in any work for 2009. I wont win or be in the top three, but who cares.

Entrecard
Between ads I’ve run and organic clicks, Entrecard brought in 255 visits in the last 30 days. A little over 1.5% of my traffic. I don’t drop cards, and I refuse to do so. I can’t earn much in the way of credits from advertising. The information on the site doesn’t make buying ads very efficient. This is probably looking at removal at some point, but probably not just yet. Remove the ad buys, and you are looking at about 175 visits, much of that I guess is due to me being semi active on the forums.

Various Directories
I have buttons for various directories on my site. I plan on keeping them for now. The reason is simple: they score well in Google for keywords I’m working on, so I want my site on their list. Also, the images are very small and they provide some sort of social validation of the site. Being among the top 10 says to someone visiting for the first time that I’m for real and not a fake. They are much smaller than full blown widgets and eventually can be buried near the bottom of the page.

Once most of this is gone, I’ll need to rethink navigation and what I want to put on the site. It is an area I haven’t given enough thought.

Categories
General

Getting a new theme

I’m starting the process of getting a new theme for my travel around the world blog. When I made my last change, it was more out of desperation. I needed to change and so I got a theme which sort of worked and did the whole thing in about 24 hours. Since then, I’ve been making changes to the header and such, and it is starting to look like more of a kludge.

I don’t think I need to rush quite as much now, so I’m going to take my time and do it right. I don’t think a magazine theme is going to work for me. I think the process will be something along the lines of: figure out what I like on other sites, try to adapt those elements to something which will work for me, customize the design elements and launch.

I’m also tempted to get a custom theme made for me. While I can tweak photos in Photoshop, doing real graphic design is just beyond me. I have neither the technical talent nor the eye for it. I’d like to have something I’m comfortable enough with so I don’t have to change it for a long time. Problem is, I’m cheap.

I am also debating the wisdom of starting an email newsletter. I’ve heard good feedback from other blogs which do it, and the brief questioning I did of other people I know thought it was a good idea. I personally think in terms of RSS, so it is difficult for me to think like someone else. I want to target non-technical users in the future, so this might be something I have to do.

I’m also starting a contest which will run during the month of November. I’ll be using a corner peel ad to promote it. It should be up in two days.

Categories
Astrobiology General Music

Travel Around the World

If you haven’t figured it out, I don’t post information about the back end or business stuff on my main site because I don’t want to bore readers with the details of running a website. I’d rather bore them with the details of traveling.

This is where I bitch about my website.

For the last six months, I’ve been trying to play the Google game and get my site ranked high for the term “Travel Blog”. At one point in June I was ranked #5 and currently I am on the front page. There are over 400,000,000 pages ranked for that term, so hooray for me.

Something didn’t seem quite right. Even when I peaked at #5, I got a whopping 26 visits to my website from Google. Just because the keyword has a lot of sites doesn’t mean a lot of people search for it. As I noted in my previous article on traffic, spending time and effort in ranking for something hyper competitive with little traffic is a suckers game. Getting beyond #5 also seems really difficult as the sites above that are Lonely Planet and TravelBlogs.org.

So if not “travel blog” what else?

A recent thread on Griz’s Make Money Online blog (one of the only ones in that genre I enjoy. Most are garbage) got me thinking about what keywords I’m targeting. Ranking high for a crappy keyword is like not ranking at all.

I have an account on SEOMoz.org where they all sorts of tools you can use to check keywords and other metrics. One item they link to is free keyword tracker, which tells you how many searches are done per day on various keywords. In the last 24 hours, here are some of the stats: (The difference between specific and general is specific is the literal string, and general is any keyword search with those words included)

Keyword Specific Searches General Searches Different Search Strings Number of Sites
Travel Blog 34 270 54 56,700,000
Travel Around the World 206 263 11 25,800,000
Travel Website 25 1,868 76 43,800,000
Travel Photography 68 87 8 14,800,000
Travel Writing 21 69 17 18,500,000

If you actually looked at the Google results in addition to this, the answer is pretty freaking obvious what I should be working on: Travel Around the World.

I’m not going to undo what has been done. Much of it is out of my control at this point, but there are many advantages to this approach.

1) Less conflict with other travel bloggers. That isn’t necessarily their niche. None of the bloggers I know are ranked high, and I’m not sure that they even would want to target that keyword.
2) Should be possible to reach #1. I don’t think it would be possible given my current efforts and budget ($0) with “travel blog” and who the competition is.
3) More traffic. More targeted traffic. My best readers are those who want to go on a similar trip or dream of doing so.

So, if you are reading this and have a link to my site, please change the anchor text to “travel around the world” 🙂

*UPDATE*
My rank for “travel around the world” was #151 before I did anything. After writing this article I changed the title of my site and rearranged some words so the keyword fit on the description paragraph on my site, and then put the keywords in bold. This morning, about 12 hours later, I am ranked #38. I have also changed the text linking to my site on this page and another blog I run, but those haven’t been indexed by Google yet.

Categories
Blogging

An insight into where my traffic is coming from

I like stats. I love baseball stats and I like looking at my webstats. I don’t obsess over the gross numbers so much as I like looking at how people find my site and what sort of thing work and don’t work in terms of generating traffic. The second level stuff that most people overlook.

For the purposes of putting some parameters on the discussion, I’m only going to look at my traffic for the six months prior to today, October 12, 2008. I’m also getting all my data from Google Analytics, which might underestimate traffic by some percent. However, so long as the percent is consistent, I’m fine with using it.

Top Line Numbers

Here are the gross stats for the last six months:

* 68,659 Visits
* 51,711 Absolute Unique Visitors
* 146,904 Pageviews
* 2.14 Average Pageviews
* 01:57 Time on Site
* 72.67% Bounce Rate
* 74.63% New Visits

What does this tell me? Most people visit and leave. This is not shocking. I think this is the case with most websites. I view my job as to capture the attention of a small percentage of visitors, a number which is in the low single digits. (it isn’t secret, I just don’t know the actual number) A 72% bounce rate is pretty good considering that the bounce rate for my top traffic referrers are much higher.

Also, you can tell by the graph that the growth trend is up, but with big spikes.

Where does it come from


# Site Visits P/V Time New Bounce
1. google / organic 16,057 2.69 00:02:40 84.77% 70.16%
2. (direct) / (none) 13,759 2.22 00:02:02 48.32% 73.09%
3. reddit.com / referral 10,851 1.15 00:00:32 87.37% 91.61%
4. stumbleupon.com 7,373 1.58 00:00:49 97.25% 63.26%
5. bloggerschoiceawards.com 1,938 2.99 00:03:23 78.28% 59.39%
6. yahoo / organic 1,521 2.02 00:02:40 84.16% 69.17%
7. google.com / referral 1,403 2.54 00:02:42 41.20% 60.66%
8. pvponline.com / referral 1,109 3.42 00:04:37 62.22% 54.46%
9. images.google.com / referral 1,031 1.82 00:00:47 96.41% 78.18%
10. entrecard.com / referral 817 1.24 00:00:48 80.78% 87.39%

This isn’t that well formatted, but you can probably figure it out if you just stare at it. What does this tell me? First, the biggest source of traffic is Google by a more than 2-1 margin over anything else. This has been increasing steadily as I’ve produced more content for Google to find. Second, the best quality traffic comes from links where people know exactly what they are clicking on. In this case, it was a link from PVPonline and BloggersChoiceAwards.com. They have the best stats across the board. Sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon can bring numbers, but it is fleeting. Google image is starting to make some inroads, but so far only 84 of my 3,600 images on my site are in the index. I’ve put a lot of effort into Google Images, with little to show for it so far.

A closer look at Google
Of the over 16,000 visits from Google, that represented 10,342 different keywords. Talk about a long tail.


1. everything everywhere 771
2. travel blog 771
3. wonders of the philippines 732
4. 7 wonders of the philippines 297
5. seven wonders of the philippines 282
6. www.everything-everywhere.com 124
7. philippine wonders 115
8. gary arndt 110
9. everything-everywhere 106
10. wells fargo sucks 97
11. link:http://everything-everywhere.com/ 94
12. everything everywhere travel blog 84
13. everything+everywhere 79
14. philippines wonders 72
15. tarawa atoll 71
16. everywhere.com 68
17. wonders in the philippines 66
18. wonders of philippines 66
19. nan modal 64
20. green sand beach hawaii 62
21. amature traveler 54
22. everything-everywhere.com 52
23. the seven wonders of the philippines 48
24. solomon islands moon rock 46
25. seven wonders in the philippines 39

Note how quickly the number of visits drops. Almost all my Google traffic is long tail stuff. The #1 keyword had 771 visits, the #10 had 97, the #100 had 17, the #1000 had 2.

Of the things which are on this list it mostly are 1) people searching for my site, and 2) people searching for the wonders of the Philippines. I rank #1 for my name, Everything Everywhere, and Wonders of the Philippines. I don’t know if I rank #1 on many other keywords.

The only keyword I’ve gone out of my way to try to rank high in is “travel blog” and that brought in about as much as a single burst from StumbleUpon or Reddit. Effort spent ranking high would probably have been better spent elsewhere. “Travel Blog” is very competitive, but “wonders of the philippines” is relatively easy. I put no effort into ranking for “wonders of the philippines”. It just happened.

Lesson: #1) focus more on developing the easy keywords. #2) be number one in the SERP for that keyword

RSS and Subscribers

This is what I really care about. I view traffic as just a percentage game to try to get subscribers. I think I do much better than most sites in converting traffic. Many sites have similar levels of traffic, but not as many subscribers. I think that has mostly to do with the “what you are doing is soooo cool” factor, which I get in many of the emails I receive.

My RSS is public, so there isn’t too much to say. Here is a graph showing growth over the last six months. It feels slow, even thought I guess it is growing at good clip.

In the end, this is what I care about. I’d rather have 1 real, regular reader than 100 hit and run visits from StumbleUpon.

Going Forward

What all this data doesn’t show is where I’ve been putting my efforts. I’ve probably put more effort into social networks like Reddit and StumbleUpon than anything else. That probably has to change. The long term bang for the buck is going to be in link building. That is much harder than submitting to social media sites, but the payoff is much greater. Not only do you get ranked higher by Google, but you get direct referral traffic, some of which might end up stumbling you anyhow.

I’ll maybe try to get social media attention a few times a month for my best stuff, but other than that, not bother.

To this end, I’m going to maybe get some real SEO assistance, especially with my images, which I still think is the biggest untapped traffic source I’m sitting on.