Well it’s a new year and a new drive of enthusiasm. Looking back on December, I can’t believe how many of you helped to push this site forward, thank you all. Here are the stats, those in brackets are from November.

Visitors

I had 2,937 (510) unique visitors from 70 (43) countries, the top five being USA, UK, Philippines, Canada, Malaysia. They viewed 6,591 (1016) pages over 4,258 (632) visits at an average of 1.55 (1.61) per visitor and a 71.40% (70.41%) Bounce rate. There were 68.48% (80.54%) new visitors since November. This isn’t bad for a new blog, unique visitors and page views increased by a factor of approx. 6.

Traffic Sources

Direct Sources - 7.82% (333). (12.5% (79))
Search Engine - 0.85% (36). (0.16% (1))
Referring Sites 91.33% (3,889). (87.34%)

So once again refferal traffic is the tops. At BloggingZoom it is still quite low at 100 (63) despite submitting another 10 posts (total 29). Still not a lot from the search engines, Yahoo sent more than Google. One thing I have noticed is the frequency of GoogleBot’s visits. Since starting the blog it came around every 3-4 days. Then since the 28th Dec it is now coming around every day, this means that pages are getting indexed faster.

EntreCard: I had 1,849 (219) card droppers and 623 (28) visitors that can by way of clicking on my ads. Traffic took a large drop over xmas but is on the increase again the last couple of days. So these figures are effectively for 3 weeks not 4. Again, a major benefit has been the networking, we’re all Stumbling each others posts and leaving comments. At the beginning of the month I had 20 comments, I now have 220 on this blog.

StumbleUpon: 4 (1) of my posts were Stumbled resulting in 886 (170) visits.

Blogcatalog: I joined this last month, Though I haven’t spent much time on it to get friends yet. Last week I discovered the broadcast feature and so broadcast a couple of posts, in return I got 74 visitors.

Reffering sites: I have been steadily leaving comments at various blogs, this has resulted in 45 visits via CyberStreet Report, 13 visits via elitebydesign and ten visits via mattnuts plus another 282 visits from another 95 sites.

So by leaving comments on 3-4 sites a day I have had 340 extra visitors, this is 8.74% of total visits! My comments were not of the “great post” variety, instead I’ve tried to add to the conversation, in one case my comments caused a blogger to change his advertising for the better. Just goes to show that your comments can work to mutual advantage and that commenting can bring in a large number of visitors.

Backlinks

This month backlinks have skyrocketed depending on where you look. Google Webmaster shows 3,476 (84), while on xinureturns it shows 0 at Google and Yahoo, 2,390 at Altavista and 1,800 at Alltheweb. After my first month of anonimity, people are starting to talk about me (thxs Reno ) and link to my posts. At one point there were 99 blogs mentioning me on Technorati.

Rankings

Google PR - 0 still waiting for an update.
Technorati - rank 104,933 (962,510) authority 69 (8)
Alexa - 182,493 (729,215)
Compete - 363,824

Can’t complain there, I haven’t really expended any direct effort to increase these rankings. In fact I’m more than happy with these results. I looked around at other blogs that are more established (6mths to 3-4yrs with PR of 1-4) and in a lot of cases I was either ahead of the game or tying with them. Go figure…

RSS subscriptions

This has increased to a wobble of 47 - 54 (16-23) plus 3 email subs. Again I haven’t campaigned for more this is just natural growth. Joining rssHugger has done little to help increase subscriptions, they have sent only 3 visitors this month.

Browsers

FireFox - 82.88%(84.49%)
MSIE - 14.35% (12.18% with a 50/50 split between v6 and 7)
Opera - 0.78% (1.58%)
Safari - 1.53% (1.42%)
Mozilla - 0.33% (0.32%)
A slight increase by MSIE nothing to worry about I also noticed that only 2% of all visitors ar4e still on dialup.

Operating Systems

Windows - 88.94% (89.24%)
Macs - 7.82% (7.91%)
Linux - 2.84% (2.69%)

A slight fluctuation, more linux or less windows? Either way it’s a move in the right direction

Resolutions

With the increase in visitors the range of screen resolutions increased to 34. Most are still over 1024×768 but I had 34 at 800×600 (0.80%) and 2 at 320×396 (0.05%).

ScratchBack

In November I started with just one entry, over the first two weeks 9 more bought links filling it up. So increased the price to $5, 1 more signed up and then no more. So I have decreased it to $2 and will leave it at that for January and see what happens. Total income $10.66 ($16 before Paypal charges).

Review

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the site’s progress, you the visitors have done as much work as I have in promoting it. I don’t know what to say… thank you.

Visitors have increased by 575.88% (an average of 94.74 unique visitors per day), comments up by 1100%, backlinks up by 4138.09% and rss up by 234.78%. If only I could keep up this rate of increase . My worst day in December (26th at 79 visitors) was better than my best day in November (27th at 50 visitors).

My weak points are rss subscriptions and search engine traffic. It’s nice to have the Su spikes and the card-droppers but in the long term SE traffic is a must.

January Actions

I wanted to add 16 post for December and I achieved that I started a WordPress/Theme series which has proved popular, thank you for all the feedback. For January I am going to aim for 25 posts, a big increase almost one a day. In November I said I was going to organise my posting, this starts on Monday. Coming up with ideas for posts I find easy, it’s the writting that I find slow, sometimes talking 1-2hrs to write a post. I am looking into ways of improving this.

I have started to pay more attention to SEO in the posts, but I will attack this more aggressively in January and go back over the older posts to update them.

I didn’t get to do any guest posting, I accidentally deleted the email and lost contact If anyone wants me to guest post or if you want to guest post here, please contact me.

I also didn’t get around to doing any article marketing, so this month I will write one article per week.

I will be running a campaign for email rss subscribers via a competition this month, I am aiming for 100 subscribers by February 1st.

I am going to get a little more agressive on Blogcatalog in marketing my site by recruiting more friends and using the broadcast feature more as it has been shown to work.

Monetizing: As I said last month, this blog will not be plastered with ads, but I would like it to support itself. To do this I am reviewing some IM type products in order to choose one. This will be done in a fairly eye-catching but low key way (is that possible?) What I would like to know from you guys is what kind of products would you buy or like to see here?

One last thing, I was over at Dosh Dosh this morning and read his post about Advice Columns. It got me thinking, and I thought it would be a great way to give something back to my visitors.

So, my second question for you is: What’s your problem? If you’ve read my About page you should know that I am basically a geek, hardware, software, web, it don’t matter to me. Go ahead and ask away, if I get sufficient queries I will do it on a regular basis and there just might be a reward or two for the top queries.

So to wrap this up, a big thank you for your efforts in promoting this blog. And there are two questions for you to answer:

1. What products are you interested in?
2. What’s your problem?