The great blogging experiment…
Well my blog has been live for a few weeks, a vast number of responses (1) but still Rome wasn’t built in a day, or a number of Blog posts.
In a previous article I spoke about why I started the blog, and there are numerous reasons. To give myself a voice, online, to practice what I preech 
– and to actually test the theory that generating increased levels of content will actually in fact increase traffic to my site.
So a few stats to kick things off with:
Since August 1 2007 – July 31 2008, my website has received 704 unique visits. Hardly something to cheer about, and not the sort of traffic required to make me millions – however the initial objective for the site was purely to show potential employers my graphic design skills.
So if we take 704 users and divide that by 12 months, we have an average 58.6 visitors/month (I will round it up to 59 for arguements sake. Whilst the site has been generally designed for search engines, I have done no real keyword research, nor have I tried any link building, other than pointing a few links to my site from other sites I have built.
52% of my visitors have come from Search Engines, 94% of those searches coming from Google. As I said initially the site was designed as a self promotional tool, and pretty much potential employers were emailed a link to my website, or they would have received it on my CV/Covering Letter. So to receive over 350 visits from search engines is a bonus. 200 of my visits is a result of directly inputting the URL into a browser, and this would seem to correspond correctly with the amount of self promotion I had undertaken upon my arrival in Australia.
Looking back at my stats when I discuss visits to my site of 59/month on average, I would pay well to consider that there is no such thing as an average month. I arrived in Australia toward the end of October 2007, so didn’t do a lot of self promoting until after that point. This is reflected in the period from August 1 2007 – October 31 2007, my site had the grand total of…. 81 visits, or an average of 27 visits/month.
In stark contrast to those months the next 3 provided a total of 198 visits, or an average of 66 month. This period really saw me emailing company execs politely begging for a job, and really driving the whole self promotion. It is also significant that a lot of traffic was generated by direct input or referrals, in fact the split is almost a third for search engines, direct input and referrals.
The following key period is from Feb 1 2008 – June 30 2008, in total there have been 330 visits, surprisingly, this also correlates to an average of 66 visits/month, however I can attribute search engines to increasing their traffic during this period, so whilst I haven’t been promoting my talents, the search engines have continued to do so (although keyword usage would dictate otherwise, but I won’t cover that here).
So why have I left the month of July out of the equation, simply because this was the month my blog went live, and I guess is somewhat of a benchmark date. So far for the month of July (which will be over in a few hours) my site has had a total of 95 visits, the highest month in the whole of the past year. I have had 2 previously good months before (well relative to general site traffic), April 2008 saw a total of 83 visits, while November 2007 saw a total of 78 visits. November would have been when I kicked off my self promoting in earnest – and there was a dip for December, and gradual rise in traffic for each consecutive month that followed until May and June which had a total combined visits of 102 people.
As my site had not been updated for sometime I can only assume Google had assumed it was losing relevance, and as such was driving less traffic to my pages, so it is nice to see that the addition of a blog has theoretically doubled traffic in its first month of action.
So why is this an experiment? I will return to these results periodically, whilst continuing to add content to my blog, and hopefully updating other areas of my website. I hope that the regular adding of content will result in increased traffic coming to my site, in particular my blog section. Additionally I am also hoping for some comments (not spammy). This post has purely laid down the previous facts, and created a benchmark from which I can measure future growth. It is worth noting that my original site was built in July 2007, so I have omitted that date from the results, to allow for spidering in search engines etc.
Many search engine gurus (myself included) advocate the timely creation of good content for websites. Blogs provide a quick, easy way to add content without having to worry about FTP, HTML coding or anything else, people like Matt Cutts have spoken extensively about the benefits of blogs to a company, so this is me tasting my own medicine and diving in.
Quantifying success, quite simply speaking, the easiest way to quantify success will be an improvement of traffic coming to the site. I haven’t discussed use of keywords on this post, as I judging whether regular updated content will actually help my site perform, without too much keyphrase/keyword research. So check back soon when I will update you on the great blogging, google, search engine experiment!
[...] Just thought I would send out a quick update based on my previous post, the great blogging experiment. [...]