What do you mean, Valentina?
In a minute. First, I am so pleased to announce my first earnings. My first month in business as a blogger I had the following income:
Adsense: $ 5.28
Nitro Marketing $48.50
Total: $53.78
What this amount does is take care of some small bills, for example Hostgator, Wordpress, purchasing Ewen Chia's new book How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business
and a coffee or two with my friends. Hey! Its a beginning!
Ok... on to the goals.
What I mean is that when I published my January Blogging Anaylitics I made a few goals to be achieved in February which in retrospect were not well founded. How I made these goals was to look at what January produced and simply doubled the results for February. What Results? What the analytics for February did was to bring me quickly to a realization: if I am going to make goals, there has to be a foundation for reaching them.
What I had in mind for February was to double all statistical figures. It did not happen. Here is what did happen:
Screen shot #1
Screen shot #2
Comparative Data: February vs January 2009:
Number of visits declined by 25% Yikes!
Page views declined by 4.25% - sweating bullets now
Page visits up by 27.88% - redemption yet!
Bounce Rate declined by 7.19% - that's good
Average time on site up by 58.5% (to over 6.05 minutes) WOO HOO! That's really good!
Most popular posts were:
Avoid Time Thieves - Focus on Blogging
Oh Google My Google, Where has the Adsense Gone?
Bloghosting - To Pay or Not To Pay
Traffic Sources
I am encouraged that the search engines are finding this blog. The Search Engine generated traffic is up to 8.5%, up significantly from the January figure of 1.18%.
What do these statistics tell me and what can I do to improve in March?
The good stuff:
#1. I really find it encouraging that the average time on the site is now 6.05 minutes. What that tells me is that visitors are spending time reading the content. Moreover the bounce rate has declined by almost 8%, which again substantiates that visitors are coming to read.
#2. Search engine traffic up by 7.32%. I don't know what a guru's take on that would be, but I'll tell what mine is ... I'm doing cartwheels! I think ideally that one would want the traffic sources to be somewhat evenly spread ... but hey! I'll revisit that when I have a better understanding of the value of each type of traffic. But for a two month old blog, that ain't no chicken feed in my book!
March Focus for Improved Results:
#1. Post more frequently. Image #1 shows a decline in traffic towards the latter part of the month. I stopped posting when I could not deliver my new blog in the way that I wanted because of my technical challenges. So, it is true what the gurus say: post, post, post.
#2. Market my posts: I can do this in several ways:
a. Repurpose the blog post with just a few changes and publish it to Article Directories (at least one - more if possible). What this does is that it gives me valuable backlinks and it just might drive some traffic to this blog. In the long term it will give authority to this blog and drive it up in Google's and other Search Eginge's rankings.
b. Use social media more effectively.
c. Broadcast to my list every time there is a new post
#3 - Launch that new blog already!
As mentioned in a previous blog I opted to use the paid version of Wordpress as the platform for my next blog. It is the platform of choice for professional bloggers and offers many more options than Blogger --- it is also somewhat more complicated than Blogger. I've never done one. Wanting to save myself some techie time grief I accepted Nitro Marketing's offer to install a new blog on Wordpress.
I was impressed with how quickly it was installed for me. Then came the techie nightmare. The installed template was simple and easy to use, not only that but Nitro uploaded 14 more templates that I could easily switch to if I was not happy with the one I got.
Having spent some time on blogs authored by Caroline Middlebrook, Yaro Starak, John Chow and others that are pulling in better than a decent annual income, I decided I wanted something different ... and therein lies the tale of downloading and uploading, cpanel and FTP (never mind, you too will one day cross the bridge).
Jeff at Nitro was most helpful in trying to help me navigate through this maze (of course being the stubborn being that I am, I wanted to know every step that I needed to take so that it is indelibly ingrained in my noggin for the next time), except that for some inexplicable reason my screen was not showing the same as it was on Jeff's. Long story short - it's up. I just want to populate it with a few more items and then voila! We're live, baby! Not perfect, but live!
Till then, Happy Blogging:
Quick Links:
">January 2009 Analytics
">Avoid Time Thieves - Focus on Blogging
">Oh Google My Google - Where has the Adsense Gone
">BlogHosting - To Pay or Not To Pay
Recommended:
PS. Be sure to post your thoughts or comments on this post (or on the blog in general) below.
