January Review
February 1st, 2007 by c4ck4 | 
Email This Post
As this blog grows and gets more popular, I will be showing you everything that I have done so far to build traffic and keep things running smoothly and automated. These will be broken down into a series of articles on the various aspects of running a site, as well as monthly review articles. Tracking stats and making changes is one of the best things you can do for your site, especially once you get up ads. You’ll want to maximize your revenue by tweaking placement and sizes and whatever other features specific ad programs give you.
January was a big month because it was the starting month of the blog, so there was a lot to do to tweak the initial set up and options. I didn’t launch the site until Jan 8, so we’re looking at 23 days here really, rather than a full month.
The blog is running on wordpress, which makes it really easy to switch out themes and plugins. This makes it easy and hassle free for anybody that doesn’t want to do a lot of coding, or doesn’t have a good handle on the languages necessary to tweak a blog. Wordpress has a good user community so there is good support for new plugins and themes, and it was also the natural choice since my hosting account offers one click installs of it.
I didn’t spend a lot of time traffic building this month, as there was no content for people to see. I focused on writing a few articles that came to mind to see how I felt about the article content and what I wanted to focus on. So far it has been, whatever I feel like, provided that I think somebody will find it interesting and worth reading. As content builds I will be placing more effort into traffic building which I will cover at a later date as it becomes more applicable.
As soon as the blog launched, I did several things right off. I submitted the url to google, yahoo, and msn. I hooked the website up to google analytics, which is basically a hit counter on steroids that provides lots of very useful information. I installed a plugin that creates a google compliant xml sitemap automatically with every posting to keep it up to date. I then submitted this sitemap to google webmaster tools, which provides other information about how google bots crawl your site and if you are in the index or not. Very useful information for anybody running a website and fairly easy to set up.
Other than this I only tried a few tricks to get traffic. I told just a few friends, did a review of johnchow.com, and dugg one of my own articles. I also left my url in a few comments on a small number of blogs. So what has this done for traffic so far? So far I have 209 unique visits and 417 pageviews. This is a good sign in regard to viewers looking at more than one page of the site, but it could definitely stand to be better. Further, some of these views are from myself, checking to make sure articles post right on the site. As the site gets more traffic, the stats should become more accurate and my own visits will become negligible.
As you can see in the referring sources, digg.com and johnchow.com are my biggest referral sources, which also represent the only two major tricks I tried to get traffic. The lesson here is that tricks work. 
You can also see however that I have a lot of direct visits. Those are probably from the people I told directly (my friends) and from my own visits to the site, so I’ll disregard them for now and see how it changes over time. Among the other information to be learned from google analytics, the top site entrances were /, /a-geeks-dream-plane/, and /john-chow-rocks/. Again this verifies that the digg and the article review were my best traffic sources along with direct. However, these three were also my top exit pages, which indicates that most of the people that viewed those articles didn’t poke around at all to see if there was anything else of interest on the site.
Overall January was a slow start, but I actually got more traffic than I expected. I need to create more content, write more articles, and put more time into the site in general. I haven’t quite gotten used to updating it at a regular frequency, but I’m getting the hang of it.