June 2011 Site Progress Report (subscribers only)
Welcome to my site progress report for June. These monthly site progress 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 May 25 to June 24.
Raw numbers
- 10 published posts (-2 compared to last month)
- 272 comments (including mine, 39.4%)
- 8,593 visits (14.6%)
- 18,116 pageviews (11.2%)
- 2:10 average time on site (-8.1%)
- 2.11 pages/visit (-2.9%)
- 737 total followers on Twitter (16.1%)
- 214 fans on Facebook (16.9%)
- 129 RSS subscribers (-46.9%)
- 183 email subscribers (37.6%)
A quick note about RSS subscribers: I rely on FeedBurner to keep track of how many people are subscribed to my RSS feed, but I’ve come to learn that their tracking is notoriously unreliable. For example, I apparently had 384 RSS subscribers at the start of last week, but that number had plunged to 129 by Friday.
Most popular posts/pages
- The Stockdale Paradox (2,074, up 8.0% compared to last month)
- Circle of Influence, Circle of Concern (1,176 views, 17.0%)
- Showering Without Soap or Shampoo: My 3-Month Experiment (686 views)
- My Ridiculous Adventure: Travel Around The World Without Flying (591 views)
- Marriage, Kids, Pornography, Masturbation (502 views, 24.0%)
Top traffic sources
- google/organic (3,082 visits, up 6.3% compared to last month)
- direct (1,712 visits, 29.7%)
- facebook.com (663 visits, -16.0%)
- twitter.com (465 visits, 30.3%)
- stumbleupon.com (431 visits, 69.7%)
Top search terms
- stockdale paradox (414 visits, down 20.2% compared to last month)
- how to prioritize your life (107 visits, 30.5%)
- the stockdale paradox (98 visits, 40.0%)
- niall doherty (79 visits, -14.1%)
- circle of influence (76 visits, 76.7%)
Goal conversions
See Karol Gadja’s excellent post on Think Traffic for an explanation of this stuff.
- Goal 1: Long Visitor (4 mins) – 949 conversions, up 13.0% compared to last month
- Goal 2: Rabid Fan (5 pages) – 387 conversions, -4.7%
- Goal 3: Rabid Fan (10 pages) – 173 conversions, 0%
- Goal 4: Rabid Fan (20 pages) – 37 conversions, -11.9%
What to make of it all
Continuing the trend of “one month up, one month down,” traffic was better this month than last, which is especially nice considering I published two fewer posts on the blog. I’m happiest of all with the number of comments over the past month (272). I’m consistently getting 10+ people commenting on each post these days, which speaks to increased reader engagement. Thanks to everyone who’s chiming in. I’ve learned a lot from our discussions.
Experiments in traffic building
Each month, I want to share with you here a few things I’ve been toying with to try build my audience and increase reader engagement…
How to get 10% more traffic in 10 minutes per week
I use Twitter and Facebook to promote my latest blog posts, and I occasionally push out links to some older posts that I’ve written. As an experiment, I decided to start automating the promotion of those archived posts a few weeks back. It takes me about ten minutes every Sunday to set this up, and it directly accounted for generating 10% of my traffic last month. Here’s a quick screencast I recorded to talk you through how it works…
If you try this out yourself, I’d love to hear what the results are like.
Out and about
I had a chat with John Anyasor on Skype a few weeks back. He gave me some advice about taking Disrupting the Rabblement to the next level and building reader engagement. To paraphrase a piece: “Dude, why are you recording videos in your kitchen? You’re in Spain! Nobody wants to see you sitting in your kitchen!”
John was absolutely right. I’d been getting lazy. So I got my ass out the door and started shooting videos all over the place: Walking through Burgos, at JFK airport, at a bodega en el campo… and so on. It was kinda scary at first, since everyone looks at you strange when you’re busy talking to that little camera you’re holding in front of your face. But after doing it a few times it wasn’t such a big deal.
And the best part? Almost twice as many views on my videos this month compared to last. Giggidy.
And it makes perfect sense, right? If people see that I’m in my kitchen for each video, they pretty much know what to expect and they’re less inclined to watch. But now that I could be recording my videos from anywhere, folks get curious and want to check it out.
If you want a no-nonsense review of your website, I highly recommend giving John a shout. Get at him via @janyasor on Twitter.
Building an email list
Looks like the exclusive content for email subscribers is paying off nicely, as my list is growing much faster than it was when I posted everything on the front page of the blog (almost a 40% increase in subscribers last month). Thanks to all of you fine folks for entrusting me with your email addresses. Be sure to let me know if you have anything else in mind that I can provide as exclusive content.
Speaking of which…
All about A Course In Courage
Last month I mentioned here that I was hoping to put together a complete tell-all about A Course In Courage by the end of June. That course was my first attempt to build a paid product, and I want to share with you all what I learned from putting it together, how much time and money I invested in it, and what kind of return I’ve received on that investment. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish that report in time, but it will definitely be coming your way before August hits. If there’s anything specific you want to see in that report, let me know in the comments.
In case you missed ‘em
Here are the posts I published in the last month:
- Showering Without Soap or Shampoo: My 3-Month Experiment
- Smart Selfish, Stupid Selfish
- Four Days Only: The Course In Courage $1 Fire Sale
- My Ridiculous Adventure: Travel Around The World Without Flying
- Five Keys To World Domination
- How I earn and spend my money – May 2011 finance report
- Leaders First
- Six Months Sober (aka How Not To Make Fast Friends In A Foreign Country)
- Conversing in Spanish and the Curse of Perfectionism
- At The Risk Of Offending All My Family And Friends…
Feedback welcome
Thanks all for your kind attention. Let me know if you have any questions or comments about this report via the comments below.
You might already be aware of this, but if you take a look at the keywords which are generating the most organic traffic for you, you’ll see that you’re on the first page of google for them.
If you then improve your ranking for the keywords which you’re not already on the first position, you will increase your traffic by a quite a bit considering the distribution of clicks on the first page: http://www.seoresearcher.com/images/articles/click-distribution-serp.jpg
For example, you’re ranking no3 for “stockdale paradox” which is accountable for the most traffic. If you go ahead and build some backlinks to that page, you’ll eventually rank #1, which might bring in as much as 20-40% more traffic.
Do the same for the first 10 traffic-generating keywords, and you’ll increase your monthly visitors with a LOT.
Just wanted to let you know about this.
Keep being awesome!
Thanks for that, Radu. I really appreciate it. One of my traffic-building experiments for this month is right in line with what you’re saying. Hopefully I’ll have some cool results to report four weeks from now
Hey Niall,
There’s a handy WP plugin called ‘tweet old post’?
I was part of a triberr group, but found that my twitter feed was getting ‘spammed’ by myself, to my followers, of blogs that I hadn’t read or couldn’t endorse fully.
I think something like tweet old post is much better, atleast putting your own work forward.
Yeah, I only heard of that plugin recently. I like retweeting my old posts manually for now though, because I can play around with the words and not just have the title tweeting out each time.
And I hear you about things like triberr. I try to be careful with what I post on Twitter and Facebook, don’t want to be wasting people’s time.