Day 16 of the 30-day Blogging Challenge
By Staingirl Elle
It’s hard to believe that we’re a little over half-way in our 30-day blogging challenge. And have we learned anything? Yes, Kaye, Daydreaming David, et al. were right. Apparently, David Cassidy is bloggable (and I still have to ask, “Seriously?”). But now for the real question: “Is content king?” If we write the content, will the search engines pick us up, and send people in our direction?
And the answer is a qualified yes. Our traffic has picked up substantially since we began our 30-day challenge, but it’s interesting to see where the traffic is coming from: 42% comes directly to us, 47% are referred to us from other sites, and 11% comes through the search engines.
I assume that the direct traffic is people who know us, whether because of having come across us in prior posts or already being in contact with us for some reason or other. After all, staingirlz.com is not yet widely known. The breakdown of the referred traffic is interesting: the bulk of our referrals are coming from daydreaming.blogspot.com (no surprise there if you have been following the David Cassidy posts and the comments). I would hazard a guess that a good chunk of our direct and referral traffic is coming due to Kaye’s networking with other David Cassidy bloggers.
Surprisingly, we are also getting referrals from digg and facebook. I have no clue as to the facebook referral. We have not yet branched out there. But digg stems from an article submitted to digg.com in September: Socialist Propaganda and Death Panels for Granny, Oh My! It got very little traffic back then, but seems to be bringing us more traffic since the beginning of our 30-day challenge.
And as for the search engines? They are picking us up, but not in the same proportion that we receive traffic from other sources. I have noticed, however, an uptick as time goes on. During the two weeks preceding our blogging challenge, we only received 1 hit from the search engine. During the first 15 days of our challenge, we received 45 visits via a search engine. Still not fabulous, but a major increase and the trend appears to be a steady increment. I had read elsewhere that it takes three to six months for search engine traffic to build up.
So what have we learned so far? If you write it, they will come, albeit slowly. We have been at this only 16 days, but I think that consistent posting does increase traffic somewhat. Other approaches appear to be more effective. Kaye’s social networking with like-minded people on David Cassidy proved to be a very effective way of bringing traffic to our site. And submission to other sites, such as digg also appears to drive traffic. We will give you a final report at the end of 30 days.
Thanks for sharing your progress. May I ask how pleased you are with the stat utility you are using? I’m using Google Analytics and honestly, there are some terms that aren’t too well defined for me. So far, Blogger has been pretty user-friendly but I’ve been having trouble interpreting the stats I get with this utility.
DD
Hi DD,
The few times I’ve ventured to look at these stats, I googled some of the terms I didn’t understand like “bounce rate” and got the answers. Elle is more familiar with these stats than I am so I’ll get her to respond. I will try to learn more before this blogging challenge is up.
Kaye
Hi, DD, Sorry to have taken so long to respond. I had no internet last night. Like Kaye, I am loving the Google Analytics. You do have to get used to the terminology. If I don’t understand a word like “bounce rate” I google the word and find any number of answers. There are a few features on the Google Analytics that I probably don’t use because I haven’t taken the time to figure them out. But I’ve developed an ease of reading what appears to be relevant after tooling around the site. If you have specific questions or an area you’d like explained, let us know. We’ll either email a response or post something on it.
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[...] answer appears to be yes, to a certain degree. In our brief update, we found that yes, traffic increased. But we appear to be getting greater amounts of traffic via [...]