According to statistics somewhere around here I am supposed to burnout and drop blogging. Nah! :) So far so good.
I picked three months periods to sum up my blogging experience and set goals. So here is my first milestone.
Readership
What is a blog without readers? Ok, I am nowhere near thousand daily visitors which is considered good goal to achieve. Still I am extremely glad to see people coming, actively browsing my blog, commenting on posts and even coming again.
In last month I had 2000+ visitors (4000+ since beginning).
Since fixing grave mistake with RSS icon placement my subscriber count reached (and froze) around 140. I have no idea why is stopped increasing and can’t link it to any changes I made.
360+ comments were made. Thanks to Lyndi of nice2all, Ben of frogstr, Ky of t3hcnophilia, Nihar of NiharsWorld and everyone else who became part of my community! :)
Content
Aiming for daily posts. 107 posts in three months. I know I missed few days but could keep it consistent overall.
Top pages:
- http://www.rarst.net/ (obviously)
- Optimizing blog with YSlow (StumbleUpon)
- http://www.rarst.net/page/2/ (go, page two! you rock!)
- 5 reasons you should use plain text to save your data (group writing)
- Recipe for engaging post (group writing, StumbleUpon)
I like a lot idea of Skribit service to receive suggestions from my readers. So far it was totally no good. :)
Traffic
Many years online but I had no clear understanding of how traffic works. There are sites, there are readers and they somehow meet, right?
Traffic is probability. Probability that someone sees my comment at other blog, visits, converts into faithful reader, stumbles my post and starts avalanche of other visitors. Ok, that was best case scenario. :)
Building traffic is building those probabilities. Large, consistent and long term ones are best.
Top traffic sources:
- StumbleUpon (20%)
- Entrecard (14%)
- Freeware Genius (11% thank you, Samer!)
- Google (10%)
- gHacks (4% should I pitch Martin part of soul for spot at his blogroll?)
Sitemaps created, indexing is good, reached PageRank 2… Got slapped with heavy penalty that totally destroyed my search traffic for last month. Google sandbox or whatever it is.
Seems it started to recover slowly since yesterday. At least I am able to google myself again.
Design
I picked very simple and clean theme from the start. Went through several stuff it/cut it cycles. Really have to finalize it but that requires some heavy plugin tweaking I am lazy to do.
It works, it loads lightning fast, it has crappy placeholder instead of logo which I should really order.
Monetizing
I started with an idea that monetizing is part of serious blog experience. That idea had died sometime around second month.
Blogging and making money online are two totally different things that simply can occur in same place. I am way more focused on blogging, so this blog is financial hole. No stories of getting rich here.
Goals for next three months
- Finalize design.
- Work on branding.
- Build traffic.
- Produce more guest posts.
- Increase interaction with readers.
- Get myself better mobile device.
Enabling new StumbleUpon features
Being programmer is tough
Twelve months blogging milestone
1000 comments milestone
Good stuff mate and thanks for the mention. I am particularly impressed with your RSS subscribers count to be honest. 140 is a huge achievement for a relatively young blog. Your traffic seems OK too if you exclude Google. I honestly think you are on the right way. As you mentioned you really need to establish your brand I think, it’ll help the site a lot.
Your page 2 is a killer! ;)
Keep up the good work…!
Thats awesome mate , these are good figures..you need to be proud of your work in the last three months…
@Ben
I don’t really get dynamics of my RSS. It is not consistent with traffic. :) Well, can only keep doing what I do.
Google seems to snap out and I get traffic again. Took almost exactly one month.
Branding… Going to get logo soon. Thinking how can I improve theme looks without ruining clean and light looks. A lot of tweaks from recent blog critique to do as well.
@ZK
Thanks! :) It’s really hard to notice slow improvement so I set myself time to look back and count numbers. Really helps me to beleive that I am indeed moving forward at nice pace.
Congratulations are in order. For 3 months these stats are impressive, especially that subscriber figure. If you keep this up the rest of us will have to make an appointment to visit your site pretty soon. Well done and keep it up. Thanks for the mention as well.
@Lyndi
Thanks! :) Having such active and friendly commentators as you and Ben really helps my blogging mood.
Keep up the good work, Rarst!
@Ky
Thanks! :) Will do.
Hey Rarst,
Well I found you from another Blog comment. So I guess it does work. Great work in a short time. I hope you start making some money from it to.
I just became another reader.
@Luca
Comments work. :) Monetization is simply not a priority for me. Making serious money is called work, I have enough of that already. I would be glad if this blog starts paying for itself (hosting/design/promotion/etc) in the future but for now I am working on content, experience and traffic.
Welcome and thanks for commenting. :)
Well done! good to see you havent thought about stopping yet! that means you’re well ahead of most bloggers :D
@Tom
Thanks! :) No point in stopping so early. I guess most drop out because they have some high expectations about instant fame/money/feedback/whatever. Achieveing something is never ever easy otherwise it wouldn’t be goal to achieve.
Thanks for the link love…
@Nihar
Thanks to you for being active reader and always commenting on posts! :)
Getting visitors for your blog is pretty hard, really. But you were able to increase your traffic and I believe it was such an achievement for a blogger. Now you’re inspiring me to push harder in this field :) Good luck for the succeeding months!
@Jenelle
Thanks and good luck to your blog as well! :)