I started blogging in January 2009. Since then I’ve had 33,884 visits to my site, 15,013 at the original wordpress domain and 18,871 over here. Over a quarter of the total visits (9,134 to be precise) have landed in the past five months. I’m pretty confident these are very modest numbers, and because I blog first and foremost for enjoyment, I’m absolutely fine with that. This is not the start of a pissing contest. I have previously promised to share information about the business and this feels like a useful place to start. So what have I observed?
Correlation
There is a close match between the number of posts I write, and the number of reads. No big surprise maybe, nevertheless the match really struck me when I lined the two sets of figures up for you this morning.
Comments
Since I moved the blog here in April 2010 I’ve posted 145 times and these posts have generated 708 comments. A lot of the comments are mine in reply to other people but I think an average of nearly five comments per post shows a healthy level of interaction. I get a lot of satisfaction from receiving comments on the blog. I try and take time to read and visit many other blogs and comment on them too – it’s all one big conversation to me. I’ve worked hard at this reciprocal concept and I think it’s worth it. I learn loads from the comments I get here on the site and of course I learn from going elsewhere to read and engage in dialogue too.
It’s not just about the posts
As you can see from the screen shot below, the pages and posts which get the most visits here aren’t blog posts, but stuff related directly to the business. I think this observation is really important, particularly for small businesses like ours. I blog because I enjoy writing, sharing and learning and the visits we get are looking at much more than the blog posts. This feels like useful marketing to me. I have no way of knowing but I’m pretty sure if our website and blog were separate, the pages about who we are and what we do would probably not get nearly so many views.
Sources
I think it’s worth a quick look at where the traffic to the website comes from. Since April 2010 roughly 30% of the visits are direct, 15% from search engines (Google a country mile ahead in that mini league), 50% are referred from places like LinkedIn, Twitter, HRZone and XpertHR (thanks to you all), the rest fall into “Others” (note to Google Analytics, that’s not very helpful). In the last month the figures are 23% direct, 23% search engines, 43% referred (a big chunk of this from Twitter), and 17% others.
I read a lot of great blogs which I imagine get a much bigger readership than this one, so I confess that writing this post has been a bit of a nervy experience for me. I can barely spell SEO let alone know how it works and what it does so there’s no technical inspiration here. I’m simply publishing this in the hope that people will find it useful. If you have any comments and feedback, and if there is any more detail you would like to see please get in touch and I’ll do my best to help. And of course – thanks as always for reading, I appreciate the time you invest here.
