January 2012 Site Progress Report (subscribers only)

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Welcome to my site progress report for January. These monthly reports are a way to keep myself motivated and accountable. I’m hoping I can build my audience significantly over time and share what works for me.

Here are the numbers for ndoherty.com for December 25 to January 24.

Raw numbers

• 11 published posts (same as last month)
• 451 comments (including mine, 67.0%)
• 18,399 visits (31.5%)
• 32,209 pageviews (43.7%)
• 2:36 average time on site (20.0%)
• 1.75 pages/visit (9.4%)
• 1611 total followers on Twitter (8.9%)
• 711 fans on Facebook (5.5%)
• 460 RSS subscribers (3.4%)
• 919 email subscribers (45.3%)

Most popular posts/pages

1. What Happens When You Try Flirt With 100+ Women In 2 Weeks In Amsterdam? (3,820 views, 583.4%)
2. About page: Think For Yourself, Follow Your Dreams, Piss Off Some Zombies (1,196 views, 252.8%)
3. The Stockdale Paradox (1,181 views, 25.5% compared to last month)
4. Showering Without Soap or Shampoo: My 3-Month Experiment (1,073 views, 39.5%)
5. Marriage, Kids, Pornography, Masturbation (818 1,049 views, 22.0%)

Top traffic sources

1. google/organic (6,233 visits, 9.0% compared to last month)
2. direct (3,230 visits, 21.5%)
3. reddit.com (2,721 visits, 100%)
4. facebook.com (1,290 visits, 4.5%)
5. Twitter (847 visits, 4.3%)

Top search terms

1. stockdale paradox (362 visits, 18.7%)
2. niall doherty (225 visits, 11.4%)
3. rabblement (142 visits, 86.8%)
4. disrupting the rabblement (126 visits, 21.2%)
5. kids porn¹ (126, 68.2% compared to last month)

Goal conversions

See Karol Gadja’s excellent post on Think Traffic for an explanation of this stuff.

• Goal 1: Long Visitor (4 mins) – 2,496 conversions, 55.4% compared to last month
• Goal 2: Rabid Fan (5 pages) – 785 conversions, 119.9%
• Goal 3: Rabid Fan (10 pages) – 181 conversions, 81.0%
• Goal 4: Rabid Fan (20 pages) – 26 conversions, 30.0%
• Goal 5: Mailing list sign-up – 304 conversions, 195.1%

What to make of it all

Well, can’t complain when pretty much everything is on the rise. That traffic spike on January 2nd had a nice impact, came courtesy of some linkage on Seddit (read the comments there at your own risk ).

More importantly, average time on site, pages per visit, and mailing list sign-ups have all increased nicely since the redesign, so I must have done something right there. Comments also increased significantly, suggesting more reader engagement.

Experiments in traffic building

On December 26th I launched the new site design. Here’s a reminder of what I was aiming for with the new look, with some thoughts on how I fared…

1) Faster and stronger first impression

I wanted first-time visitors to get a good idea of what the site is about within just a few seconds of clicking through. Hence the big buttons under the banner highlighting some of what I consider to be my most engaging content.

Quite honestly though, I’m not sure how effective this has been. I’m still trying to wrap my head around Google Analytics. I was hoping I could just use their heat map tool to see how many clicks I was getting on those buttons, but for some reason the data isn’t showing for those links.

The best indication I have then that there’s been a slight improvement in this area would be the overall bounce rate² for the site, which dropped from 75.4% to 71.9%. Not as big an improvement as I would have hoped, but an improvement nonetheless.

2) Higher conversion rate for mailing list

I tucked the manifesto away behind the mailing list to see if that will act as a greater incentive for people to subscribe. I also turned the homepage into a big funnel for email sign-ups, and tried to make the forms throughout the site more visually appealing.

I was pretty happy with the results here. More than 300 people signed up to the mailing list in 31 days, a much higher rate than I’d been achieving before. In fact, more people signed up for the email list in January than in the previous two months combined. More importantly, despite all the new subscribers, open rates haven’t dropped off, hovering just above the 50% mark for each message.

I have several sign-up forms throughout the site. Here’s how each one fared last month:

• Form below each blog post: 75 conversions, 0.7% unique conversion rate³
• Homepage form: 71 conversions, 4.6% unique conversion rate
• Sidebar form: 42 conversions, 0.6% unique conversion rate
• Forms inside posts (enticing folks to sign up for my traffic and finance reports): 38 conversions, 25% unique conversion rate
• About page form: 33 conversions, 4.8% unique conversion rate

3) High-quality look and feel

Since I make my money as a web designer, it’s important that my primary web presence look sharp. I want folks to recognize that I’m a bit of a ninja when it comes to WordPress and the like.

Hard to tell if the redesign has been directly responsible for any of the new clients that have come my way in the past month, but I know it certainly hasn’t hurt.

In case you missed ‘em

Here are the posts I published in the last month:

• How To Change Your Mind
• Never Been Punched (Or Why I Can’t Write About Cheating)
• How To Win The Lottery
• The Month Of No Self-Promo: How Can I Help You Be Successful?
• The Price Of Freedom: Everything I Earned And Spent In 2011
• How I Earn And Spend My Money – December 2011 Finance Report
• One Pair Of Pants (And Other Tales From A Minimalist Wardrobe)
• What Am I Missing?
• Site Progress Report: December 2011
• Ask The Readers: What Was The Most Important Lesson You Learned This Year?
• Christmas Alone (and a New Look for Disrupting the Rabblement)

Feedback welcome

Thanks all for your kind attention. Let me know if you have any questions, comments or suggestions via the comments below.

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Disrupting the Rabblement is proudly supported by donations from generous readers just like you, allowing me to finally retire full-time from the stripping industry (I was especially popular with the over 60's crowd).

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