I've been inspired by Mr. Sterling Lynch's recent post on his blog's traffic numbers (and absolutely fascinated as well!). He was right: I do find it useful to compare his traffic numbers to mine. After some investigation, I've realized that I'm doing pretty well. Therefore, in the spirit of sharing, I've also decided to publish my blog stats to all of you in the hopes that it might be useful to someone else. I currently don't have any other statistic program running on my site and so my statistics all come directly from Wordpress.
Since 29/08/08 I have had 11, 769 visits to this site. Now, this number is relatively small compared to Sterling's, but that's because I wasn't really all that active on my blog until about March 2008, which is when I started pushing it more by linking the notes to my Facebook account and updates. My individual site visits hit over the 1000 mark in June. In fact my busiest months have been June 2009 - 1,880 and July 2009 - 2,152. This makes sense for a few reasons. First of all, it was around this time that I started using Twitter to promote my blog. It was also during the Ottawa and Winnipeg Fringe Festivals, where I was writing practically everyday and was getting tons of pingback links through their sites. My busiest day was 22/06/09 with 206 visits - right smack in the middle of the Ottawa Fringe Festival.
Not counting this one, I have 117 posts and 235 comments. I don't respond to every comment like Sterling does, so this number is actually pretty close to reality. That said, because he replies to the comments on his site, Sterling encourages discussion, which then brings in more comments and more page views. I can learn from that.
Search engine terms to find my blog usually have to do with some variation of my name or the blog title. Though I was interested to see that a lot of people found me by searching for "Countries Shaped Like Stars" (which sends you to my review of the show) and "Gladstone Theatre Ottawa" (which puzzled me because I went through 5 Google search pages and found nothing about this blog). What terms a person used to find my site is a great source of enjoyment for me. You can find some real gems there including: "hairpulling catfight", "so", "la in me love you long time 9" (not making that one up), "vehicle registration plates in manitoba", and "im struggling upcoming artist?"
Visitors have been referred to my site mostly through Facebook, Twitter and a link from my old blog incarnation. The rest come from something called Alpha Inventions (which I haven't fully figured out) and my friend's blogs. In order of popularity, I get most of my friendly traffic from the Adorkable Thespian, The Many Faces of Wayne, The Ottawa Arts Newsletter, Reverberations, and finally Movement (Welcome to the party, Sterling. Nadine, I owe you a drink.)
Finally, my top 5 most popular posts and pages are as follows:
Nancy's Must See List at the Winnipeg Fringe - 428 Upcoming Appearances - 396 About Nancy - 386 Nancy's Must See List at the Ottawa Fringe - 373 In Loving Memory of my Friend - 161
I'm not surprised by these numbers and they do corroborate Sterling's theory that "When people like a blog post, they often want to know more about the person writing the blog post." I encourage you to read the rest of his theory on the effectiveness of social media tools with regards to personal interactions with the writer. I pretty much completely agree with him on that point.
All in all, this has been a very interesting exercise. Based on the information collected, I'm quite certain that I have approximately 35 to 40 regular readers who check my site everyday for new stuff. When I write a new post, that number easily doubles or even triples.
I'd like to think that this readership also translates into my business world (attendance at shows, networking opportunities, ect.) but I have no way of verifying that information.
So, thank you dear readers, I definitely would not be here on the interwebs without you.