Google Analytics and AweStats are the programs I use when I want to look in detail at my website statistics. Woopra gives me a regular quickly accessed overview of blog stats as the program comes on my PC start up. The start of the new year seemed a good time to do some analysis on my stats and my blogging methods. I came out with some very useful information including some surprises. Hopefully this analysis will be of some use to you too, as an indication of areas that are worth concentrating efforts on.
I am a member of a lot of Social Networking sites, although my degree of participation varies a great deal. It tends to be based on which sites I enjoy, especially the social aspects, although these are also communities where readers are more likely to result. I know that I could be much more systematic and organized in how I expend my efforts online, rather than fluttering from place to place without prior planning or without following the planning. There are just too many sites to be successful as an online social butterfly – the wings are just not large enough, being a social Albatross would be preferable.
I know the theory behind SEO and increasing visitors but tend to lack in the implementation of it. Being a bit of a net junkie the time and effort requirements do get fulfilled but matters such as keyword analysis take a back seat I find this tedious, although I do tend to use openings that are hopefully Google Getters. This has become more automatic rather than thought out, although on writing the first sentence here I did have this in mind and reworked it.
To the stats themselves – I compared 2008 annual figures from Awe Stats and Google Analytics. Although there was a lot of variations in the two sets of figures, when I grouped the numbers and looked at them both in percentage terms there was much less variation. I split the figures into groupings based on the type of networking involved.
Entrecard (+ related sites) 15% – I expected these to represent a fairly large proportion although I don’t think they necessarily translate to readers and bring few comments. After initial enthusiasm I no longer spend much time with Entrecard.
Lists and Blogrolls – The vast majority of this 4% is made up of lists I have qualified for rather than blog submission sites – Top 100 and top 50 women Australian Bloggers, a Do Follow list. Sitehopping has brought a small but steady stream of traffic too. The the blog directory sites were not doing anything at all and by mid year I had removed all of these buttons. I had joined these sites when I first started blogging and before Social Networking sites had taken off.
The amount of visitors arriving from Social Networking sites surprised me, especially how many referrals Stumbleupon had sent, as you can see below:
Stumbleupon sent me 23,500 visitors last year even though none of the submitted posts received huge amounts of thumbs up – no “Digg” effects are apparent. Although I do send my posts to contacts via the SU toolbar occasionally, many more were reviewed and given thumbs up without this. I do not enjoy Digg and have not had any enthusiasm for doing what is needed to get a post rated highly there.
As SU took up such a large proportion I have analyzed the other Social Networking Sites on their own without SU.
Although I expected Twitter to do well, I was surprised to see Blog Catalog in second place and Technorati in third. Considering I have not participated in Blog Soldiers and the Good Blogs for months, and no longer have the widgets installed, they performed quite highly. I do not use Mixx a great deal so that figure is not a true reflection on how well it could do for others. Nuffnang Australia has so far proved excellent considering the short period of time I have been a member, although that could be initial enthusiasm that comes along with something new. It will be interesting to see what results arise being featured blogger of the month on Nuffnang. I am pleased that diigo did so well as it is my favorite bookmarking site, with good social networking features thrown in.
Zimbio, which is not included above as I did not consider it a networking site as such, brought me 9674 referrals over a short period of time for just one contribution; my Best Sites For Good Free Stock Images post.
I also had a closer look at which posts were the most popular. (Publishing links to older popular posts is always a good strategy, not only for newer readers who may have missed them the first time round but to increase the number of links within your site.
These vary from the Most Popular Posts listed in the sidebar because of different time periods used but both show how popular the image posts were. I believe I managed to get in quickly with the Domain Name post and it was a subject that attracted a lot of interest… The fact that the Favicon tutorial did so well is related to the nature of blogs. There are many posts and static website articles on this topic but this was much more recent than the others. It would be an interesting exercise to write another post on the same subject perhaps later this year, I suspect this too would do well..
So what does all this mean for the year ahead? I will concentrate my social networking efforts on the sites that have been the most useful in terms of visitors and most satisfying in terms of connecting with people. I will make an effort to participate more in Mixx. The Scoutle widget will reluctantly be removed from my footer. The concept is good but it has not proved effective visitor wise and the widget often causes very slow page loading times. I am going to continue giving Google Friend Connect a try – the poor lonely contact widget, which I recently installed, will have to be moved – again because of page loading issues. Nuffnang has yet to produce any ads and the widget’s intrusive size still bugs me.
I will also find time to do the full blog redesign that I have intended to do for a year, which I subequently planned to complete by today; to be installed in replacement of my Christmas theme. Instead I just quickly changed the colors and removed the Christmas images.
I hope these figures give you some indication of the worth of sites in relation to bringing in readers as, having read what others recommend, I do not think they are particularly out of the ordinary. If your experiences differ I would be interested in hearing about them.
