It has been a long and hard two years blogging but I have finally reach the 1,000 unique visits a day club.  I created this illusory goal for myself to reach my first major milestone for my flagship blog, this was to get to 1,000 unique visits a day and hold it consistently for several days in a row without "StumbleUpon" spikes being the driving factor.

I reached that milestone in the middle of August, and have held over 1,000 unique visits per day for 5 out of the last 7 days, with my other days being slightly under in the high 980+ range.

When blogging it is essential to set goals and create objectives and actions you plan to take to work toward those goals.  Creating items that you can measure will help you see progression and since visitors to your site are so easily tracked with Google Analytics or other alternative to Google Analytics, visitors are a metric I can measure and follow every day.

I know this traffic is small compared to many sites but it is a landmark compared to others who are still struggling with 50-100 unique visits per day.  I had gotten stuck in a rut a little over a year ago where my site had only 250 visits per day and wouldn’t go up for a few months.  I had another plateau in the very early part of 2010 where my site would be stuck at about 500 unique visitors per day without budging. 

I experimented with different articles, keywords, article submission sites and in the last two months I partnered with MGID.com traffic exchange program which helped and now accounts for about 5% of my site traffic, bringing me around 1100 visits per month or so.

Don’t be afraid to experiment and try new things, comment, guest post, promote like hell on Twitter, Facebook, Posterous and every other social media or article site you can submit to.  When blogging remember that you can never be spread too thin, the more you exist online (by showing up in various search engines) the more you will be found.

My blog gets over 60% of its traffic from Google Search engines, this is down from 75% because of experimenting with MGID and other referral networks to bring in more referral traffic.  Note, I actually haven’t reduce my number of visitors from Google Searches, the number is consistently higher, I just added more referral traffic sources as well.

Here are my top 10 traffic sources for DragonBlogger.com for the past 30 days:

You can clearly see that other than MGID, most of my referral traffic brings in less than 300 visits per month, but they all add up.  Having about 10-20 social media sites and article submission sites working together can add up to thousands of visits per month combined.

Bottom Line:

Never stop trying and experimenting with new social media sites, article submission directories and be sure to take the time to Optimize Blog SEO to ensure you maximize your traffic from organic searches.

-Dragon Blogger

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Earnings report for May 2010 shows that my earnings in May were slightly decreased from April 2010 by about $10, but the previous two months were over a hundred more than the previous month of March.

This was my highest earning month ever from Google AdSense which earned me just over $56 dollar in May and continues to climb dramatically since I tweaked my AdSense blocks four months ago.  I was averaging only fifteen to twenty dollars per month before switching to 350×200 ad block sizes.  SocialSpark was a little dry for me this month and only earned me $44 due to a lack of advertisers in the system.  I did however pick up a few direct sponsored posts from advertisers which helped keep my overall earnings fairly good for May 2010.

A single post opp from PayPerPost and ReviewMe helped round out my earnings for the month.

So far here have been my earnings from my 3 blogs since January:

• January:  $426.49
  
• February:  $192.17
  
• March:  $136.21
  
• April:  $225.71
  
• May:  $215.08

This means my total blog earnings for 2010 so far this year is $1195.66 so far and my average earnings per month is $239 which is about 1/2 of where I want to be.

I still need to work to improve my site’s pagerank and bring in more traffic, I am almost at a point where I think I need to spend some money and purchase some high PR backlinks to help improve my pagerank, but I haven’t looked into it officially yet.

How did my fellow bloggers fare in May 2010?

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL

I have decided to post a full traffic report for 2009 for DragonBlogger.com to show you the results of my first full calendar year blogging.  I originally started this blog on August 23rd 2008, so I didn’t have a full year of traffic to show previously.  According to Google Analytics (which doesn’t track Su.Pr links or some other traffic sources)

DragonBlogger.com had a total of 141,667 unique visits and 276,532 pageviews for 2009.  This is an average of just over 11,000 visits per month, which is much lower than my average of 15,000 visits per month for the 2nd half of the year.  My site averaged around 200 visits per day in January 2009 and is now up to almost 400 unique visits per day average over the past few months.

My traffic sources have changed too dramatically over the past few months, for the whole year my traffic sources were 59% from Search Engines, and 25% from referring sites, with 14% from direct traffic.  But in the last four months my traffic is around 71% from search engines and about 20% direct traffic, with my referring sites being a lower percentage as I relied less on Entrecard, StumbleUpon and other sources for “quick, but not long term” traffic spikes.

Twitter meanwhile accounts for only about 1% of my blog traffic and falls under the Referring sites.  While I still had a staggering amount of traffic coming from StumbleUpon over the past year as my posts were randomly stumbled by readers (and a few by myself).  The breakout generally shows that 84,000 of my visits were from Search engines.  This is a good thing and a bad thing, the fact that the blog gets so many visits from Google searches means that my blog is indexing well in the search listings and people are searching for things that link to my blog.

The disadvantage however is that should some other site take over some of my popular keywords or categories which Google has me doing well in the search results, I could suddenly see a huge drop in traffic if I were to lose the top 5 search slots for some of those search terms.

My top search terms for the year included 5 related to “Unfollowing” in Twitter, which is one of the highest risking terms for me losing traffic in the future I think.  Meanwhile Shiny Search was my #1 keyword and I was in 2nd place behind the company that makes the Shiny Search website.  I also have a few for Heroes reviews, which also will likely taper off if the show comes to an end after its 4th Season with the Nielson Homescan which is one of my oldest posts getting a lot of traffic as well.

My top pages that were visited over 2009 are:

This again shows that the Twitter unfollow is one of my biggest traffic sources for single search, my actual “category” page itself brought in 15,028 visits for the year (which is odd that it hit my category than a single article).  I don’t know if its a good or bad then when your categories are indexed by Google and the category itself is a high traffic source.  I also have some high traffic to a few NBC Heroes reviews, the Nielson Homescan and my post I wrote in September 2008 about Managing your iPOD with Songbird for Ubuntu.  Funny that a post I wrote in September 2008 still received over 2300 visits in 2009.

Summary:

2009 was a stellar year for DragonBlogger.com, I was happy to have made some high search engine placements and gain enough traffic to be listed in the Top 10 Technology Blogs listed on IZEARanks.com.  This also was great because I saw my Alexa.com rank drop from just over 100k in the first part of the year, to less than 50,000 toward December 2009.  I do however have concerns that some of my highest traffic posts will suddenly lose traffic, so I need to constantly generate new content and capitalize and new keywords and tags to keep the content relevant.  Writing about content that stays relevant and static for more than a few months is really hard to do in the Technology field as technology changes so rapidly that you can write a post about something in March, and by October it is such outdated information that people will rarely search or read information on it.

That is my full report of my 2009 traffic analysis, I am hoping to at least break 200,000 unique visits in 2010, I would like to be around 30,000 Alexa rank by the end of the year and have an average of 500-600 unique visits per day.  I have little control over reaching these goals except for posting quality content and doing the SEO and promotion to help try and get my site noticed.

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL

I learned something over the last few days that I want to share with my readers and that is there seems to be no 100% accurate way to track the unique visits and pageviews to your blog without directly accessing your web server logs.  In using Su.Pr heavily on the latter part of last week I saw my blog visits were virtual flat, no increase, yet checking my stats on Su.Pr website showed I was getting dozens of clicks and in some cases over a hundred to a single blog post on one day.  I checked my Counterize2 Stats and nothing, checked my Google Analytics stats and again, I can’t see any increase in visits and no referrals from su.pr or stumbleupon for those posts which supposedly received 100+ clicks on the Su.Pr links.

• I did more digging and noticed my RealRank was very good (170 average) but again wasn’t reflecting the amount of visits I was actually getting, Google searching and found the following out:

• Izearanks does not track Stumbles to your site or Su.Pr at all, maybe not even Ow.Ly or other URL shrinking referrals, this means that your RealRank is not an actual reflection of your unique visits it omits what could be a huge amount of alternative traffic to your site.

Google Analytics does not accurately track stumbleupon or even track Su.Pr referrals at all to your website or blog, it does track StumbleUpon stumbles (but not 100% accurately) and it does track Ow.Ly which is Hootsuite’s shrinking service.  This means your Analytics are wrong for your blog and site if you are heavily using Su.Pr or StumbleUpon.

This makes me wonder how can we provide accurate unique visits and impressions numbers to would be advertisers if we can’t find a service to accurately track all of the visits to your site, I am pondering a solution to this problem.  My blog may have as many as 200+ more unique visits per day from services that don’t even reflect on IzeaRanks or Google Analytics, this could be the difference of 5000 impressions per month or more.

Su.Pr definitely helps get your blog tons of traffic, but it doesn’t reflect anywhere which is concerning to me, I am hoping to find a way to solve the issue and have engaged StumbleUpon’s support site.

So remember if you are stressing over why your blog may not be getting as many unique visits as you would expect, and you are heavily using StumbleUpon or certain URL shrinking services this may be a cause and you should find an alternative web site tracking.  If you know of any that are better than Analytics, for tracking visits & pageviews let me know.  By the way, if you don’t know what StumbleUpon Su.Pr is then you should probably read my StumbleUpon Su.Pr post.

-Dragon Blogger

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