Blogsolid December 09 stats
Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
The first month of my Blogsolid ownership is gone. It’s time for the first stats.
Visitors
- 4015 visits:
- 60.25% referrals
- 19.85% search engines
- 19.85% direct
- 0.05% other
- 1.86 pages/visits
- bounce rate 66%
Let’s analyze:
The visits
The visits are lower as on majority of sites in December (apart from those about Christmas maybe).
There is a drop in referral traffic. This comes from lost links from blogs, which removed Blogsolid from their sidebars when it was sold. If I were them, I might have done the same to protect my blog form the new owner. I mean, I could be anybody – I could have inserted loads of links here to some shadowy sites or I could have displayed nude pics of ladies and gents. If I did that, Google could have quickly reduced rankings of blogs linking to what it calls “a bad neighborhood”.
Even if other bloggers didn’t care about Google, they simply might not want to link to someone they do not know.
The biggest hit Blogsolid is going to get for this is not the referral traffic but loss of rankings. You can see that it already moved from PR4 to PR3. This will definitely impact it’s search engine rankings.
On the side, I’m want to add that this particular problem, just as reduction in RSS readership, is characteristic particularly for blogs. If you buy a website which does not place the significance on the editorial team but only on the content itself, you will not get such penalties.
The bounce rate
We can see the changes I expected in the first stats post – search engine traffic is increasing (by 2%) and so is the bounce rate. Although the bounce rate grew more than I’d expect from a shift in traffic source because it grew by 5%.
From the bounce rate analysis it is clearly visible that it increased a lot around the 20th Dec, which is when I made the biggest changes to the design. I’m going to leave these for a while, but if the bounce rate does not drop over the next moth or so, I will have to admit my error and consider reverting some or even all the changes.
Website optimisation is a game of trial and error..
RSS readers
To my surprise, readership did not drop that much. I lost only the initial 10%. It’s great you guys are still sticking with me.
Money
Yes.. we made some first bucks… well.. cents actually…. 
It’s 44 cents from Adsense in the RSS feed. I am actually quite surprised it is anything at all. Adsense is “not perfect” for a blog like Blogsolid, visited by people who know what adsense is.
In the future though, I will have to think of something more relevant, so that it actually makes sense to have an RSS ad. For now – adsense will remain.
I can also say that my first experiences with using Google AdManager are very positive. The interface takes some time to get used to but using it and pulling reports it very smooth.
I updated the budget spreadsheet. You can see that I spent 17 hours working on Blogsolid. A lot of that went into the redesign. Hopefully I will not have to do much more of that, so in the next months I can focus on posting.
We are now nose diving into costs and registering an increasing loss on the investment. This will probably continue for good next few months or even for the whole year before I can turn this around. As I indicated in the Blogsolid plan, I intend to come back to an overall zero in 2 years. Luckily majority of the cost is my time, so there is no real cash outflow. Blogsolid will not make me broke. Still, I could be doing something else with my time where I would be getting paid, so I do not take cost of time lightly.
In general, I am quite happy with the developments, maybe apart from the significant increase in the bounce rate, which I will have to investigate further.
Let’s see what future brings.
Jasha Says:
January 8th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Please consider that, ad sense for feed is something that will drive money into your wallet only when users read the feed reader. It means that they will open your feed only after they are notified of new articles. I doubt anyone use feeds to surf into past articles of a blog they are following.
In the last month you haven’t been blogging much, as you said you were doing some restyling. Well, what i’m trying to say is that i’m sure ad sense will be a great source of money once you will start blogging regularly and maybe even improving feed readers.