Traffic Stats From Month 1 of Layered Thoughts

Yeah, I know, I’ve been lagging pretty hard on posting here. Oh well. I’ve been in a less than good mood lately so wasn’t feeling it. But I’m going to try and post every other day in May, and I have a pretty solid list of topics I want to hit, so til then, chill out. I’m also going to write up at least 2 more posts in the niche product sites guide, hopefully more, so stay tuned for that too.

So around the end of March, I resurrected this old blog domain of mine and ripped out all of the old posts and decided to start fresh with a whole new set of topics and posts. Since then, things have gone pretty well. I got ridiculous traffic from that post I did on the simple Watir bot, which was sweet. I definitely need to man up and write up some more posts on that topic, people were obviously very interested in it. After that post, things settled down quite a bit, and I’m back to about 75-100 visitors a day pretty consistently. I’m really happy about that, blogging without readers is always difficult

So enough with the babbling, here are my analytics screenshots for the first month of Layered Thoughts:

Traffic Overview

As you can see in there, I got a little over 4000 visits, about 6500 page views, and an average time on site of a minute and a half. Not too bad. You can also see the traffic breakdown per page, as well as the splits amongst my referrers. Search traffic actually makes up a small portion of my traffic this month, all because of that post sending a huge amount of traffic through Hacker News, Wickedfire, and random other sites. I would imagine my search traffic will be a much larger percentage this month.

That Watir Post got me just under 1000 visitors (980, damn it) the day after it was posted.

Content Stats

Standard stuff…watir post was number 1, my main url #2, and the niche product sites guide #3. The last two are most definitely because of my forum signature at Wickedfire.

Keyword Stats

This data is fun. It’s always interesting to look at the keywords people find a higher traffic site with. You get an idea of all of the stuff you never would have seen/planned for when doing keyword research. I have a whole post planned about my rankings for the keywords “web bots”. I’m also planning on doing some actual link building down the road to try and get up at the top for those keywords (I’m currently at around #11-13). I’ll case study that stuff for sure.

Visitor Stats

Obviously a savvy crowd reads this site, as Internet Explorer makes up 4.71% of the browsers used. That is not a normal number for most sites, it is usually much higher. But this data is typical of nerdy sites

Subscription Stats

49 subscribers is pretty awesome. Anyone who wants to seriously blog should focus on his subscribers count, as this number is a count of people who will immediately see when I post without having to check back on the site. Good stuff, thanks to everyone who subscribed!

Coming Up

I’m going to do a post like this every month, because I know that when I was getting started with all of this stuff, I always wanted to see numbers and graphs and real data.

Coming up, I have a few random posts I want to write as well as I’m planning to finish up the niche product sites guide. There are some great topics coming up with that guide, including keyword research, content creation, and link building, so definitely stay tuned, it’s going to get fun.

Like I said in the beginning of this post, I’m going to try and post every other day in May. Posting every day is too cliche . I also want to try and keep pushing this blog further and start getting more and more traffic for it to see what level I can get it to.

Finally, I’m planning on doing either some interviews with some of the more popular IM/SEO guys or some guest blog posts from there, or a mix of both, so if there is anyone you want to see talk here or anything you want me to ask people, let me know in the comments section.

Til next time,

D