September 2011 Site Progress Report (subscribers only)

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

Raw numbers

  • 11 published posts (same as last month)
  • 377 comments (including mine, 38.1%)
  • 11,329 visits (1.2%)
  • 20,000 pageviews (-11.8%)
  • 2:34 average time on site (-8.7%)
  • 1.77 pages/visit (-12.8%)
  • 1071 total followers on Twitter (12.7%)
  • 325 fans on Facebook (14.4%)
  • 214 RSS subscribers (5.9%)
  • 395 email subscribers (16.5%)

Most popular posts/pages

  1. The Stockdale Paradox (1,075 views, down 20.2% compared to last month)
  2. Circle of Influence, Circle of Concern (991 views, -15.2%)
  3. $50 Blogs for Rabble Rousers (822 views, -18.5%)
  4. What To Do If You Hate Your Job (489 views)
  5. About (427 views, -29.7%)

Top traffic sources

  1. google/organic (4,306 visits, down 1.1% compared to last month)
  2. direct (1,984 visits, 1.0%)
  3. Twitter (821 visits, 51.0%)
  4. fluentin3months.com (621 visits, -12.5%)
  5. facebook.com (553 visits, -22.7%)

Top search terms

  1. stockdale paradox (529 visits, down 16.3% compared to last month)
  2. intelligent words (133, 70.5%)
  3. circle of influence (129 visits, 20.6%)
  4. niall doherty (118 visits, -3.3%)
  5. how to prioritize your life (114 visits, 10.7%)

Goal conversions

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

  • Goal 1: Long Visitor (4 mins) – 1,426 conversions, down 4.0% compared to last month
  • Goal 2: Rabid Fan (5 pages) – 419 conversions, -22.7%
  • Goal 3: Rabid Fan (10 pages) – 139 conversions, -31.2%
  • Goal 4: Rabid Fan (20 pages) – 27 conversions, -38.6%
  • Goal 5: Manifesto downloads – 91 conversions, -19.5%
  • Goal 6: Mailing list sign-up – 83 conversions, -27.8%

What to make of it all

Not too shabby. The previous month saw me hit 10,000+ visits for the first time, and this month saw a slight increase. Most of the numbers signifying reader engagement dropped though, which is hardly ideal. Hopefully we’ll see them bounce back in October.

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…

Guest posting (here and elsewhere)

I didn’t guest post on any other blogs this past month, but I still saw a nice bit of traffic come through from my August post on Fluent In 3 Months.

Meanwhile, I did accept two guest posts here on Disrupting the Rabblement in September, something I hadn’t done before. Both of them did well in terms of comments, views and shares, and gave me more time to focus on other things in the lead up to my RTW trip. Worked out very well.

Virtual Assistant SEO

As mentioned a few months back, I hired someone via oDesk to do some SEO work for me. The idea was to get one of my posts showing up first in Google for the term extreme minimalism. That experiment has effectively ended now, and it doesn’t look like it’s been a success. Google can take a while to reindex and rejig things, but I’m not getting my hopes up for me to jump to the top spot anytime soon.

Site Redesign

I have in mind to give this site a complete makeover in the coming months. I’m convinced that there’s a lot of room for improvement, and that everything could be better optimized to expose key content, keep visitors engaged for longer, and ultimately generate more subscribers. I’d hope to have the redesign launched by the end of the year, and you’ll be able to see for yourself how that affects the numbers in future reports.

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.

P.S. My first site progress report was posted September of last year. We’ve come a long way, baby :-)

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

  1. Ajay Reply October 2, 2011 at 3:16 pm

    Great progress, Niall! Keep it coming, you are an inspiration to many !

    Were you always listed on the first page of the ‘extreme minimalism’ search on google? If not, that would be a good success factor for your SEO experiment.

    Ciao

    Ajay

  2. David Damron Reply October 2, 2011 at 5:31 pm

    If you haven’t already, check out social triggers for conversion help. I am sure you have…but just in case you haven’t

    :)

    David Damron

    Running Somewhere

  3. Trevor Pirtle Reply October 2, 2011 at 5:47 pm

    For extreme minimalism you rank at the moment page 1, #3. That’s a failure? If you ain’t first your last?

    Thanks for sharing!

    • Niall Doherty Reply October 3, 2011 at 12:45 pm

      Hey Trevor. It’s a failure in the sense that #3 was the starting position, before I even began the SEO experiment. So it didn’t really have any affect on the rankings.

      There is a pretty big difference between being first and third in the rankings. Some studies (like this one) show that the first result gets four times as many click-thrus as the third.

      Thanks for the comment.

Leave a Reply

Disagree all you like, but please be respectful. Your email address will not be published. Your first ever comment here will be held briefly for inspection by a highly-trained grey squirrel named Cocopop.

Link to my latest blog post