If you are wondering why this is called The Real January Traffic Report, last month’s report was mistakenly called January Traffic Report. It should have been called December Traffic Report!

One twelth of the year is over already! Time is just flying by… You guys constantly surprise me with the support you’ve shown to this site, thank you. January was another successful month (mostly). In this report the numbers in brackets are the figures from December so you can see the increase or decrease.

Visitors

I had 7,236 (2,937) unique visitors from 94 (70) countries, the top five being USA, UK, Canada, Philippines, Malaysia. They viewed 15,528 (6,591) pages over 10,415 (4,258) visits at an average of 1.49 (1.55) per visitor and a 72.17% (71.40%) Bounce rate. There were 68.58% (68.48%) new visitors since December.

Traffic Sources

Direct Sources - 8.12% ( 846). (7.82% (333))
Search Engine - 2.71% (282). (0.85% (36))
Referring Sites - 89.17% (9,287). (91.33% (3,889))

So once again refferal traffic is the tops.

Direct Traffic: This month I had 846 (333), two and a half times as much as December. This is a good sign, it means more of you have bookmark the site and visit.

Search Engines: The Search engine traffic is starting to come in now with 274 from Google and 7 from Yahoo. This is mostly a result of adapting the posts so that the SE’s like them more.

EntreCard: I had 3,252 (1,849) card droppers and 1,309 (623) visitors that came by way of clicking on my ads. My ad queue has been constantly full all month despite the rise in my ad price of around 330-390ec’s.

StumbleUpon: 19 (4) of my posts were Stumbled resulting in 2,379 (886) visits. The post Who Stumbled My Post? garnered a hefty 1,861 visits with a peak of 1,521 on one day.

BloggingZoom: A slight increase at 112 (100) despite submitting another 7 (10) posts to give a total of 36 (29).

Blogcatalog: This month I was a lot more active in finding friends, this resulted in 178 (44) visits. this resulted in a slight increase of visits 119 (74) visitors.

Referring sites: I have continued to leave comments on other site this month as it was succesful last month this resulted in another 578 (282) visits from another 163 (95) sites. Tthe top three being ahkong.net at 82, CyberStreet Report at 43 and MG’s Blog at 14.

So by leaving comments on 3-4 sites a day I have had 578 (340) extra visitors, this is 6.22% (8.74%) of total visits! My comments were not of the "great post" variety, instead I’ve tried to add to the conversation.

During the first week of January I wrote a post Traffic Attitude Offer, from this I have had 1,235 visitor via traffic attitude, ranging between 29-69 visitors a day.

OnSite Comments: At the beginning of the month I had 220 comments, I now have 505 on this blog.

Backlinks

This month backlinks have skyrocketed depending on where you look. Google Webmaster shows 6,913(3,476), while on xinureturns it shows 197 (0) at Google, 3,270 (2,390) at Altavista and 3,180 (1,800) at Alltheweb.

Rankings

Google PR - 0 still waiting for an update.
Technorati - rank 41,092 (104,933) authority 150 (69)
Alexa - 77,813 (182,493)
Compete - 103,721 (363,824)

This month there was a Google update. This site stayed at zero Not sure why and neither are others that I’ve spoken to. I don’t have any paid links or PPP, in other words I do not buy/sell PR links and the site is gradually growing.

RSS subscriptions

This has increased to a wobble of 105-112 (47 - 54) plus 16 (3) email subs. The email subs are due to $100 competition I’m running, but I’m more than happy with the growth in the reader subs that have just about doubled. I have found rssHugger to be a big disappointment after all the hype, this month there were 0 referrals (3). I’m sure glad I didn’t pay the $20 to join.

Browsers

FireFox - 82.86 (82.88%)
MSIE - 14.82% (14.35%)
Opera - 0.84% (0.78%)
Safari - 1.17% (1.53%)
Mozilla - 0.25% (0.33%)

Not much change here.

Operating Systems

Windows - 89.74% (88.94%)
Macs - 7.67% (7.82%)
Linux - 2.49% (2.84%)

A slight increase for Windows this month

Resolutions

With the increase in visitors the range of screen resolutions increased to 50 (34). Most are still over 1024×768 but I had 204 (34) at 800×600 1.96% (0.80%) and 2 at 320×396 (0.05%).

ScratchBack

No change this month Come on guys, it’s only $2 for a link to your site

Review

The blog is now 3mths old, I wasn’t sure at the start if it or I would last this long but we have, thanks to the support and encouragement of you. I now see why blogging is so popular, the sense of achievment, writing about stuff that I like, meeting and working with others.

Visitors have increased by 244.59% (an average of 335 (94.74) unique visitors per day), comments are up by 229.54%, backlinks up by 198.88% and rss subs up by 207.40%.

In January only 4 days were worse than my best day in December (6th at 239 visitors), Another way of looking at it is that 27 days this month were better than the best I ever had last month.

February Actions

Posting: I aimed for 25 posts and ended up with 21. If I was a pessemist I would be disappointed, but I’m not. I am writing fairly large posts about WordPress themes that do take time to write. These are interspersed with medium sized posts.

This month is the shortest, only 28 days, so I plan on a more realistic number of 14 posts (1 every other day) plus maybe the odd one extra here and there. I would rather write a post worth reading than post just for the sake of hitting a target.

SEO: I shall continue my SEO work as it has proved successful in getting more SE traffic. I have even surprised myself with the number of useful keywords that I have been able to get onto page 1 of Google in such a short time. I thought it would be more difficult.

Guest posting: This month I guest posted at EntreCard Forever. I also had Mike (Saphrym) guest post here with Kill Them With Kindness. If anyone wants to guest post here, the doors are open. I am also available for guest posting.

My campaign to get more friends at BlogCatalog is proving successful, so I shall continue in February.

Monetizing: I am still debating with myself about Project Wonderful… Most that I’ve seen is to advertise within EntreCard sites which I think is a bit foolish. If I do go for PW then I shall be looking at sites outside as EC viewers are already a more or less captive audience and I don’t want to remain dependant on EC for traffic. It might cost a bit more but there should be more exposure. At the moment EC contributes 43.79% of my traffic, I would like to get that down to around 20% in the medium term.