Every quarter I like to review how my blog is doing because I think it is a good idea to share everything I’m doing. Hopefully any success my blog is showing will give some motivation to other people to start up a blog. You’ll be amazed at how many people are interested in what you have to say. If I can build up the following that I have done in a little over a year, anyone can do it. It’s easy to be dedicated when there are such great people who are there to give encouragement.
Unique Visitors
It has been a slow growth from last year, but as you can see the total unique visitors to my site has risen steadily and is up over 1000 per month now. In my wildest dreams I never thought that I could attracted 1000 different visitors to my site in an entire year, let alone per month.
Visitor stats for months of April, May and June:
- 4995 Visitors
- 2748 Unique Visitors
- 2533 New Visitors
- 2422 Returning Visitors
Page Views
Page views is a great indication of the quality of the content on your blog. The more page views you get per viewer the more it means they like what they are reading and are interested in reading even more. By the looks of the chart above, I’ve done a good job of getting people to stay on my site and read what I’ve got to say. This is very gratifying for me.
Bounce Rate is another wonderful way to judge the content on your site. The bounce rate simply is how many people leave your blog after reading only one page. You want this number to be as low as possible because people tend to want to read more articles if they like what they are reading.
Time on site is yet another way to determine the quality of the content on your blog. The longer they stay, the more they will read and the more it means they like your articles.
Here is how I stacked up in these categories (Q1 stats are in brackets)
- 26,273 page views (Q1: 15,779)
- 5.3 page views per visitor (Q1: 2.76)
- 4 min 6 sec average time on site (Q1: 3:35)
- 16.35% bounce rate (Q1: 53.08)
All of these are outstanding and huge improvements from January through March.
Traffic
Referring Sites: Most of my traffic comes from Referring sites like Flipthiswholesaler.net and GoodFaithInvesting.com. One of the best ways to get traffic to your blog is to visit and comment on other people’s blogs within your niche. Make sure those comments are of high quality and you can be assured to attract readers over to your site. Below is the list of the top sites that have referred traffic to me over the past 3 months.
Search Engines: The best and hardest way to generate traffic to your site is through search engine results from searches for keywords related to your niche (I.E. Probate Investing). Even though it is hard, the long term benefits are invaluable. The potential amount of new visitors makes this traffic source something to strive for.
When I first started out last year, I was lucky to get one or two visitors from search engines per day. Now I get about 20. In Q1, 1,057 visitors found my blog from different search engines and this Quarter the number rose to 1,186. That’s 129 new visitors to my site.
Here is the break down of which search engines sent me traffic
Direct Traffic and Other are people who have most likely typed my web address directly into their browser and by some other means I’m not sure about. I don’t really keep track of this but it’s nice to know that an additional 1200 visitors found my site this way.
Keywords
When I was talking about search engines above, I mentioned keywords. Keywords are those search terms people use when they are Googling (or binging, yahooing or what ever). When writing blog posts or articles it’s very important to pay attention to the topic and use the appropriate keywords within your post and post titles. You’ll want to make is sound natural and appropriate or it’ll be obvious what you are trying to do. Also if you try to repeatedly use the keywords you could get flagged by Google for keyword stuffing. When you get flagged it really hurts your sites ability to show up in search results. I actually use a tool called Market Samurai to help me find alternate, but related keywords to use in my posts. For example, instead of saying probate I might use deceased, inheritance, last will and testimate. Market Samurai is great for finding these alternate phrases. If anyone is interested I could produce a quick tutorial on how to use it. Anyway I’m getting off target a bit here. The point is if your blog post is about Wholesaling Probate properties, make sure to include those words in the title and body of your post.
Here are the keywords people have used over the past three months to find my blog.
Top Content
Last but not least I wanted to show everyone what posts/articles have gotten the most readers on my site in Q2.
The number 1 spot is my homepage and number 3 is the category page for probate investing but by far and very consistently the most popular article on my site was written by Justin McClelland.
Earnings
I also wanted to share with everyone how much I’ve actually earned from my blog over the past 3 months. I’m sure many of you have noticed I’ll put up affiliate links to products that I have used and I also have Adsense ads in a few spots (upper right corner of my blog and in posts older then 7 days). I do this in order to help me defer some of the costs to run the blog and also to see if I can eventually use the income to help me put more money into Real Estate Advertising. My current $200 budget doesn’t get me very far. So here is the break down of how much I’ve made…
That is a total of $389.99
Not a lot of money, but enough to pay all my hosting fees and also to help me buy stamps. Thanks to any who has ever bought a product through one of the links on my site I really appreciate it!
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Comments 10
Great stuff! You're blowing me away in the area of search engine traffic 🙂 I haven't done AdSense at all but a couple hundred bucks doesn't seem to shabby.
Ueah, how do you guys get so much search engine traffic?………That's good stats…
The search engine traffic has grown pretty good. I find though that most of the traffic comes by way of a few articles and from searches of people I've mentioned on my blog like yourself 🙂
It's all about keywords and making sure you create content that contains those keywords. Plus the longer your site is around the more credibility it will hold in google's eyes. My search engine traffic is small potatoes compared to what it could be if I were better at writing to my keywords.
Thanks for sharing Scott. My blog is only a couple of months old and I am still in the beginning stages of “upping” my stats. Like you, I really appreciate the traffic back to my site.
We are also working hard on keywords. Still learning every day!
Sharon
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Shae,
Its great added revenue if you don't rely on it. Pay down mortgages, increase marketing, whatever you want. Your blog could easily draw $50-$100 mo in passive revenue. I have only generated $32 in 2 years, but that's $32 I didn't have before. Your blog has 100x the traffic mine does.
Jason
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The only reason I haven't added AdSense is because I never know what ad is going to show up and that bugs me. 🙂 I like having my section that promotes products/services I really like and that has provided income…plus I can then promote only what I *want* to promote. I may have to take another look at it and at least see what my options are in terms of having input/control over ads in AdSense.
Shae,
With Adsense, you can block specific urls from advertising on your site. This would come in handy if say you didn't want to advertise Sims 2.0 or something similar. Granted though, you don't really know what you want to block until you see it pop up on your blog for the first time.
I was actually thinking about selling advertising space on my blog instead of putting the adsense units in. That way I would have full control of what is showing up.