The beginning
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 2:47 am
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
Dune by Frank Herbert
We cannot start our journey without defining exactly where we are.
Time
It’s December 2009.
From now on, every month, I will evaluate the progress of Blogsolid by presenting it’s statistics for the previous month. These monthly stats will show us if the efforts to grow this blog are successful.
By making December my first month, I am doing myself a small favour. A year will elapse on 30th November 2010. Novembers are usually good months when it comes to online business – not to many holidays add up to a lot of online activity. It will be easy to score well in November.
Visitors
I will use statistics provided by Imar for the Flippa auction when he was selling Blogsolid. These show September and October figures. I do not have figures for November (when the sale was taking place), so October will have to do.
The starting point is therefore:
- 4,891 visits/month
- Referrals: 62%
- Direct: 21%
- Organic 17%
- 9,847 page views per month (1.98 per visitor)
- Bounce rate : 57.24%
These stats are actually quite strange, at least for my experience. PR4 and only 17% of visitors from search engines is something extraordinary for a website like Blogsolid, which is pretty much dormant.
I can see two reasons for this:
- Limited amount of content – only 45 posts. Google does not have enough stuff to search for. If this is the case, we should see increase in visitors with each published post.
- SEO opportunities. Blog solid has a very good external SEO. It has many incoming links from high quality websites. However, there are many opportunities to improve the site internally, which could help the site get more traffic. I will introduce all these changes in the future, so we will see if that’s the case.
I show bounce rate for informational purposes only. I am curious as to how it’s going to change in the future. If my expectations are correct and we will manage to increase the amount of visits from search engines, overall bounce rate will probably also grow. On all websites I own, bounce rate of traffic from search is always the highest. The lowest is from referrals – Wikipedia in particular.
RSS readers
Number of RSS readers which I will use as a benchmark is 679. This is the number with which I have acquired Blogsolid.
You can see the initial drop in the number of subscriptions (631 today). This is normal – many people unsubscribe from a blog when it’s sold. The blogger they liked to read left and they don’t see a point in sticking around.
I think these numbers will continue to fall for a while. Some of you guys, who stayed to see what my plan is, will not like my style or point of view and will unsubscribe after a couple of posts. This might last for the next few weeks after which we will probably see the bottom and then first signs of recovery.
Now we know where we are. In the next post, I will outline the plan for Blogsolid.
Till then!
Juha Ylitalo Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 3:24 am
At least for me, one of the things that makes this site interesting, is that your from EU block. That makes your blog little bit different from what one would expect from US and/or Australian based bloggers.
Matt Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 4:16 am
It is true that Europe seems to be underrepresented. That’s probably the language barrier. Internet is divided into languages like the world into countries. I bet there are great blogs in Finish, French, Spanish or German, but that’s almost as if they were in different dimentions. Links very rarely point in the direction English blog -> other language blog.
Jasha Says:
December 9th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
good analysis, i share your opinions and i think soon this blog will start moving in the right direction. What’s sure is that you have bought a great established environment, that’s the base for every good long-term project.