7 months ago I tentatively hit the blog waves and I have been reading traffic stats ever since. I have noticed a few trends on The Pisstakers in terms of visitors, some good, some eye-brow raising, and one, bad.

The good bits are: increasing traffic, a steady increase in the the time that visitors spend on the site per visit, a drop in the number of visits per reader per day and some really cool commenters.

The bad bits are: some of the keywords people search for! Many are, shall we say, surprising. I have dispensed with a few of those in a post called Keyword phrases to cringe at!

Increasing traffic

After reading this next paragraph, perhaps you will be able to work out how many unique visitors I have had this month (up to 21st of May):

Starting in September, traffic rose from zero to around 600 per month by November. In December that monthly total doubled - despite Christmas spirit that ruins it for the last week opr so!. By March, the monthly traffic doubled again, and with spring in the air, April saw 10 times as many people visiting as had called by in any one of the first three months. (I am running around the stat counter here, so keep up!) So, here in May, I predict I will reach last month's total by the 24th.

The uniques count for May up to today is? Answer at end of article

More time spent on the site

I estimate that if you read this article and then go check out this post from beginning to end, you will increase the average time each visitor spends reading The Pisstakers by at least 10%. And because there is only text on the page, the hit on my bandwidth will be negligible!

Out of interest, how long do you spend on this site on average? If it is more than 2 minutes, welcome to the 6% bracket.

Less visits per visitor per day

I think this is good? Most newcomers can't believe their eyes the first time, and have to return later to confirm that they won't be coming back again. That number is going down and regulars are going up.

A weird stat is that something like 70% of visitors are first timers and about a third of them bookmark the site, but most don't return. I think I need to do a widget for them. The self destruct bookmark. If it isnt used within 7 days, it blows up your computer. What do you think?

It is also quite scary to think some really important people have taken a look at this site, and rolled their eyes never to return. Oh well, when we are famous!!!

More comments, and plenty of cool ones too

As a blogger, there is nothing quite like reading new comments. It is like astronauts finding life on Mars. They revel in the knowledge that there is somebody out there perhaps even bigger than themselves! So, thank you to those kind souls for making a sad blogger happy.

As an aside, I read that if you get 1 comment per 400 visitors, you are doing OK. A round of applause to the trend breakers here, then. And apologies to silent visitors who obviously read stuff here and lose the will to write even a few words in response, in anger, in sympathy. For what it is worth, I try to leave a few words when I call by, because like I said, even a couple of words makes a difference to morale.

A few more trackbacks

I didn't know much about Trackback, all very blog nerdy, but they are a good time saver and a neat way to promote your own posts too!

Say you already covered the same topic as me, and have nothing else to add to my post, just ping through your article to my comments box via trackback. That way, you don't need to dream up any thing new to say, you add to the "conversation" and you can lure people away from The Pisstakers to read your far more entertaining words in their entirety.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

So there are a few hidden insights to the state of blog traffic(king) here. How does it compare to your experience? And for them that care, I have had 5000 unique visitors , and 22000 pages read up to the 21st.

And that just goes to prove that Google page rank is not an indication of popularity! In Google's eyes I am more "valuable" than John Chow dot com's site last month. Yet he earned something like $10000 and had more than 20 times my level of traffic. Just blog and ignore the stats!!!