Darren of Pro Blogger posted a great post the other day about 69 Questions to Ask to Review Your Blog I think it’s a great way to start the new year by evaluating what my blog accomplished for me this past year and what I accomplished for the blog and you, my readers.
Traffic Questions
- How did your traffic change in 2008? 2008 was the first full year that I had my current blog open and the first time I was tracking hits and visitors and monitoring it.
- What was the biggest source of traffic in 2008? Why was it big? Search, residual from Stobist in 2007 and StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon got me a lot of suprise hits and has made me think I might want to have some sort of alert system in place to let me know when I get a sudden high influx of traffic. The second time a page to a lot of StumbleUpon referrals it was actually broken. Not good.
- What types of traffic didn’t grow in 2008? All of my traffic grew in 2008 – it was nice :)
- Take some time to analyze traffic sources including search engines, social bookmarking, other referring sites, direct traffic – are they trending up or down? Up since 2007 was a play year.
- Where did you promote your blog in 2008? What is promoting? Interesting – this term you use. I just did my thing in 2008 – commenting on good blogs and posting my content, you can’t promote till you have good content.
- Did the promotion pay off? See also #5.
- What search terms are people typing into Google to arrive on your site? Search terms bring them to articles – not the site. That’s why I’m working on a redesign to help make that the focus of my visitors.
- What seasonal traffic was their in 2008? None of my traffic seemed to be season based. Not as far as I could tell – it all seemed to be on an up curve not a seasonal variation.
- How many pages were people viewing on your site per visit? 1 maybe 2 if I’m lucky – 3+ when the article is more than two pages deep. Hence why I am focusing on refocusing my design to showcase articles and not have so much junk in the sidebar – if they’re not using it – take it away.
- How much time did you put into building traffic, promotion, marketing, SEO in 2008? Not nearly as much as I could have but just as much as I should have. SEO I spent just enough time on each post making the links all well worded and the titles well structured. I think 2009 will be important for building traffic and promoting.
Look for the continuation about my own feedback about this blog over the next few days – have anything to add or suggestions – please do post a comment. Your feedback is more valuable than you know.
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Just stumbled upon your blog while at work. Love it! You’re pretty much in the same boat as me: web dev by day and photography hobbyist by night. I love how you combine them.
I look forward to reading more. Hit me up sometime and we can talk if you want.