After sifting through the Technorati lies, Alexa damn lies and Google/Awstats statistics, this is The Pisstakers' 6 month stock take, plus an appraisal of where our future lies .

The reality of The Pisstakers' appeal

According to the Awstats data, we thought The Pisstakers blog was on the up with growing page views and visits per day. February seems like a slow month but is still close to the level of our exciting January burst/coming of age. It sort of made sense that a growing number of people are finding the funny in our different web, tech and news topics. We think we are loosening up at last and writing increasingly better articles.

According to Google Analytics, though, we are deluded about being popular. This week we averaged between 28 and 60 people on any one day calling by. Sure they visited a couple of times or more, so page visits were as Awstats stated, but Google's graphic showed clearly that we aren't pulling as many fans as we thought.

Content is king of where? Never never land?

Every reader who likes our twist on the real world is a gem, but are 28-60 uniques/day a successful position for a big blog to be in after 6 months? If we were just spending an hour a day producing content, yes, but hours and hours?

We spend at least 3 hours a day giggling and chuckling as we update the site with mainly original material: a light-hearted article on web/tech news; two satirical news stories; a Quote of the day; a solitaire story; linking with a one-liner comment to Techboggle's Deal of the Day; a videoclip for the front page; a couple of personal blog observations; some sort of blog review; plus a revamp of the front page to guide to the new posts,... And we do that every day.

The way ahead for The Pisstakers blog?

We know we started from zero (perhaps even minus) in every respect - knowledge, theme and traffic - and we aren't going to stop, but we must be doing something/many things wrong with the way we use and promote our material. Afterall, many blogs hit the ground running, and generate hundreds of uniques a day and just get more and more popular as they post and post and post. So where do we improve and get closer to what now seems like a deluded position of 10,000 uniques a month?

Improved SEO

We have had a few good lessons from SEO expert Linda at Shyflower's A bit more aware of keywords, our articles seem to be more SEO friendly than before. Do we get more traffic as a result? Funny is a competitive keyword, but I saw that Google does return our site with funny quote of the day on page 2, so I guess the answer is, Yes, and one day search engine traffic will be significant - but due to which keywords, who the hell knows! (Apparently John Chow has never dropped his pants for cash, but he is still top ranked under whore - go figure!)

Network with the right sites.

We have been trying to learn what blogging is all about, so I tend to hang out with groovy design, and mercenary monetizing and traffic building experts. We are picking up lots of info on the intricacies of Adsense etc, and plan to avoid it like the plague till we are popular. Also BAYB a multi author blogging community is one of my favorite ports of call every day, and I will continue to support it, but to be honest, we aren't in the best peer network to make a humor blog famous.

Work the MyBlogLog community

This is a site for wannabe and king-size bloggers to hang out. Having read around, we are pretty funny in comparison to many, and so the way ahead is to hold our head high and really focus on saying hi to like-minded humor sites. Our recent review of Brohans was our best greeting and sign of intent yet, I think. So more of the same, probably is in order.

And we have started writing for a video blog called Top Funnies. The world's best comedians, what a great topic to promote, and the exposure should raise the profile of contributors.

Use the social bookmarks better

Bonsai Studios went to the trouble of adding quick links to 10 different bookmark and news sites, but it doesnt seem like anyone is that motivated to put our articles forward on our behalf. We will have to work a deal for someone to digg and reddit past timeless articles for us.

So there you go, not so funny reading!. But whatever happens we are here to stay and are content in the knowledge that we definitely have a prettier site than most.