October 2011 Site Progress Report (subscribers only)

Welcome to my site progress report for October. 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 September 25 to October 24.

Raw numbers

  • 10 published posts (-1 compared to last month)
  • 292 comments (including mine, -22.5%)
  • 15,996 visits (41.2%)
  • 28,652 pageviews (43.26%)
  • 2:29 average time on site (-3.6%)
  • 1.79 pages/visit (1.5%)
  • 1224 total followers on Twitter (14.3%)
  • 425 fans on Facebook (30.8%)
  • 366 RSS subscribers (71.0%)
  • 517 email subscribers (30.9%)

Most popular posts/pages

  1. The Stockdale Paradox (6,312 views, up 487.2% compared to last month)
  2. Circle of Influence, Circle of Concern (1,463 views, 47.6%)
  3. 14 Ways You Can Be More Effective (880 views, 207.7%)
  4. Random Acts of Courage (680 views, 147.3%)
  5. The Disrupting the Rabblement manifesto: How to think for yourself, live your dreams, and piss off some zombies (650 views, 131.2%)

Top traffic sources

  1. google/organic (4,951 visits, up 15.0% compared to last month)
  2. lifehacker.com (3,357 visits)
  3. direct (2,540 visits, 28.0%)
  4. facebook.com (1,030 visits, 86.3%)
  5. Twitter (647 visits, -21.2%)

Top search terms

  1. stockdale paradox (526 visits, down 0.6% compared to last month)
  2. disrupting the rabblement (224 visits, 160.5%)
  3. niall doherty (221 visits, 87.3%)
  4. intelligent words (132, -0.8%)
  5. circle of influence (128 visits, -0.8%)

Goal conversions

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

  • Goal 1: Long Visitor (4 mins) – 2,235 conversions, up 56.7% compared to last month
  • Goal 2: Rabid Fan (5 pages) – 566 conversions, 35.1%
  • Goal 3: Rabid Fan (10 pages) – 146 conversions, 5.0%
  • Goal 4: Rabid Fan (20 pages) – 31 conversions, 14.8%
  • Goal 5: Manifesto downloads – 244 conversions, 168.1%
  • Goal 6: Mailing list sign-up – 152 conversions, 83.1%

What to make of it all

So yeah, the month ended with a bit of a bang. A chap named David Galloway from Lifehacker.com linked up my article on The Stockdale Paradox (which he found via my guest post on Afford Anything), resulting in a massive flood of traffic. It actually brought me more traffic in one day than I received in the entire month of October last year.

More importantly, the traffic from Lifehacker converted pretty well. All those visitors actually spent longer on the site than average, and they downloaded my manifesto at twice the normal rate. Only mailing list sign-ups didn’t exceed the average, but it wasn’t far off. Facebook likes and my Twitter follow count also got a nice bump.

Without that big spike, the numbers for October actually look much like the previous month. Amazing what one break can do.

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…

Media Coverage

I pushed hard before I left Ireland last month, trying to get some media coverage for my round the world trip without flying. I sent out a bunch of press releases and made several phone calls to newspaper editors.

In the end I was featured in three local/regional newspapers, all of which printed the URL to this here site. One national paper sent a photographer down to meet me and snap some photos, but I never heard if any of them made it to print. I also received a phone call from RTE 2FM (one of the largest radio stations in the country), looking for some quotes from me to use in a news bulletin. Again, I’m not sure if any of that made it to air. (I was actually kicking myself after the call because I knew I could have gotten my message across much better. Oh well, lesson learned.)

Anyways, all that to say that I didn’t notice anything significant traffic-wise after all those efforts. There were no spikes of note, and I heard from very few people who said they read about me in the paper or heard me on the radio.

My main goal with pursuing media coverage though is to eventually land a column for a national Irish newspaper, where I can write about travel and alternative lifestyles. I made some good contacts with all that reaching out last month, so we’ll see what happens down the line.

In case you missed ‘em

Here are the posts I published in the last month:

Feedback welcome

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

6 Responses to “October 2011 Site Progress Report (subscribers only)”

  1. Mark Reply October 30, 2011 at 4:07 pm

    It feels nice when you start noticing traffic improvement eh? I’ve been fiddling with blogs and websites off and on for years and my biggest success was a site that no longer exists due to loss of hosting and domain. It’s a pity but the traffic the way I noticed it is it went from 20-30 visitors a day to over 6000 visitors a day within 8 months. To this day I still don’t know what happened to cause such an influx of traffic. I don’t think you need any of my advice as I think you already know lol. Do what you love is all I will say besides make sure you keep FULL backups of your site and databases and such. Stuff happens.

    • Niall Doherty Reply October 30, 2011 at 7:53 pm

      Wow, that was some rapid growth, Mark. I’m nowhere near 6000 hits per day yet, but hopefully I’ll get there soon :-)

      And yeah, I hear you about backups. I have a weekly backup of my database emailed to me, and I have a local copy of all my WordPress files.

  2. Andrew Caldwell Reply October 30, 2011 at 4:09 pm

    Hey mate,

    Great wrap-up of the month there. It’s fairly evident that in this game you’ve got to be 100% committed to it (which you clearly are) but with every man and his dog running a blog now, there’s a lot getting lost in the noise, and some of the better quality sites are going un-noticed, while others are publishing turds are getting heaped with praise.

    Do you think you’d pursue a strategy of ‘getting noticed’ for a month or two? It seems to be a case of who you know = big traffic jumps, is it worth really trying to put some effort into some digital brown nosing?

    • Niall Doherty Reply October 30, 2011 at 8:11 pm

      Hey Andrew. Good question. I think it’s definitely worth it. I’ve seen the value of guest posting and know that more of that would definitely help get my numbers up, and it would be quality traffic too. Just gotta put aside the time and make guest posting a priority.

  3. Paula @ Afford Anything Reply October 31, 2011 at 4:10 pm

    I saw a little spike of traffic on Afford Anything thanks to the link from Lifehacker, but absolutely nothing like what you saw! Congratulations!

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