April Results Still Anemic - Shot of Iron Prescribed for May

Results continue to be anemic as evidenced by Google Analytics' screenshot below:


This is the flow of daily traffic. The spikes throughout the month are normal - they are the dates on which I posted on this blog. That statistic supports all that we learn in Blogging 101 - post often. Although there are also some inverted spikes, what I find encouraging is that there appears to be a trend towards an increasing flow of traffic between the spikes which means that traffic is finding its way to this blog not just on publication dates. Now that I have merged rip along and blog along, I see that search engines are once again evident in driving traffic:


Search Engines are delivering 12.75% which is decent if not outstanding. I like that 60.78% are new visits. This is important. While we would all love to have all the traffic that ever lands on our blogs love our blog and its content and return with precision regularity, the reality is that it just does not happen. It takes time to build up a loyal following. When I drill down in my analytics I am super pleased that 16.7% are loyal visitors. In my view, this is the statistic that will be the true measure of this blog's value.

So what's the shot of iron to cure this anemic state?

1. Publishing in Article Directories: The first repurposed article has been submitted. The plan is to publish at least three more in May. The value of these articles is twofold: backlinks (I promise, we'll get to these soon, but basically it means that sites outside of your own blog are pointing to your site); and, viral traffic. This is the sort of marketing that will over time increase the steady flow traffic in between blog posting dates.

2. Teleseminar: An online colleague has invited me to be the guest speaker on a telesimar. The topic will be Blogging For Money.

3. Posting: The backbone of blogging ... post, post, post.

I have mentioned several times on this blog that I have other sites which are not included in these stats. They have been up prior to this project. I will be participating in a launch and a beta from now till September. These are new activities for me. I don't know exactly what we will be engaged in. What I have decided to do is to apply what I learn from these two activities to my dog sites. I know that there will be blogging and social media involved - so it may be that the results for those will be included on this blog in the future (along with appropriate posts).

In the meantime .... Happy Blogging!

PS. Bring home the cheese

March Blogging Results - Statistics Tumble

March has been brutal ... I just did not expect that the anchor month for the first quarter of this project would deliver the worst performance since start up --- all three months of it!!! I looked with horror at my results and gulped, I mean, this is not a stock graph after all, but it could be.

On closer examination I think I have found part of the answer. More on that further. For starters, here are the stats







I must say I am a bit confused about something and will need to clear that up. As this blog is Adsense enabled, every time someone visits this site, Google captures that as an impression. The odd thing is that when I do some comparisons, I find that they just don't jive. For example, on one of the days where the analytics chart shows just one lonely visitor, my Google Impressions data tells me that it captured 38 impressions. Which got me wondering.

When I started this blog it had a different purpose and was called Rip Along With Me with a "blogspot" URL. When I decided to change tact, get a unique domain name and redirect that URL to the existing blogspot URL I thought that everything would fall into place nicely. I thought that Google Analytics would merge the two.

I was wrong! I just checked Analytics and note that I need to make changes to my tracking code if I want the statistics to reflect both URLs. There! Sooooooooo.... everything I have captured to date is not entirely accurate! The Analytics to date represent only the original RipAlongWithMe URL!

Since all my promotion has centered around the unique domain BlogAlongWithMe, none of those results have been captured! OK... that makes me feel better. No wonder the "sources" do not record any search engine traffic! Of course, I will make the necessary changes (here goes that techie thing again!)



I have gone over my posts, examined keywords and therein lies aother telling tale. I looked at the titles of the previous months' posts, and either the word "blog" or "blogging" has been in the title, whileas none of my March posts carried either word in the title. I used other keywords, but clearly this blog is not strong enough yet to get Mother Google's blessing for anything other than what I started out with: blog and blogging!

Details, details, details. It is always the small things the make the difference.

Happy Blogging!

PS. No cheese for the month of March!

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