Summary for December

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We have just past Christmas and New Year is upon us so that means it’s end month and end year for 2007, the year as a whole been a tough one on a personal note, but in terms of blogs it’s been good and enjoyable time.

So lets get into what happened in December.

Summary of December Posts.

My most popular post of December has to be The Most Important Thing you do as a Blogger, where we discuss planning and goal setting as the two key elements to successful blogging, below are a few other posts worth a mention:

Definitive List for Stumbleupon Articles. Here is a list of 33 articles from other bloggers.
Stumbleupon Exchange Sites. Places where you are able to exchange stumbles with others.
You have 10 Seconds to Impress, So Start. This is how long a person will stay at your site if not impressed.
How to Reach the Front Page Sphinn. Tips to reach the first page of Sphin, and actually this article did make it to front page afterwards.
What, Why, When, Where and How of Comments. The title explains it.

Highlights in December

First highlight has to be Comment Contest which was successful, gained a large amount of comments and of course some friends too, got a total of 300 comments from the start to finish of the contest spanning 50 days. I have seen the comments are still being posted on my blog and many from repeated readers.

Gained a couple of links from some well known websites over this month, which is great as it means I am getting noticed more by some of the big bloggers. Mentions from Dailyblogtips for my Defintive List of Stumbleupon Articles and by Prowebnews which placed one of my Sphinn articles as a Top Ten Sphinn Posts for the Year which was written by Bill Hartzer.

I made it to Sphinn’s front page twice, once for How to Reach the Front Page Sphin and What, Why, When, Where and How of Comment and I seen some good traffic coming in from Sphinn as a result from the front page entries.

Other notable achievements are breaking 100k in Alexa, ranking high for google search for both “comment contest” and “stumbleupon articles”.

Blog Statistics

Traffic

Just over 6,859 absolute unique visits for the month of December compared to 3,783 for the same period in November, my total visits did well too with a big jump from 4,575 in November to 7,855 for December. Both traffic trends are up with unique visitors increasing by 81% and total visits increasing by a 71%.

traffic

Traffic Sources

traffic

Most of my traffic comes from Referring Sites with approx 85% of total traffic, Direct traffic 10% and 3% for search engine traffic, this follows my previous month trends quite closely. Would hope to increase my search engine percentage over the next few months.
All Traffic Referrals

Heres the top ten referring sites:

Stumbleupon 5,954
Direct 820
Google 291
Sphinn 147
Yeepage.com 79
Google.com 69
Lovesickalien 53
mybloglog 38
technorati 28
45n5.com 19

Currently Stumbleupon accounts for 75% of traffic which over long term is not healthy, I will be working on reducing the percentage over the months.

Here is my list of top 10 blogs that sent me traffic:

Recap on December Goals

~~More links from Quality Blogs~~ Done

Alexa rating: from: ~~<100,000~~ 99,903

Top 2400 blogs in Singapore (according to Alexa data) Best: 2903

Technorati Authority: ~~205+~~ 209

Technorati Ranking ~~<28,000~~ 27,217

Technorati blog reactions: ~~450~~ 450

Feedburner RSS subscriptions: 150 Best 137

Completed 5 out of the 7, considered not bad results but was little disappointed with my RSS feeds

Money Earned in December

Adsense : $10.04

Smorty, Sponsoredreview, etc $78.00

Advertising: $10

Cashcrate: awaiting first payout

Reduced earning in December but this was forseen with it being Christmas etc.

Goals for January 2008

Conclusions

Blogs momentum is still strong and have had an increase in unique visitors and total visitors and should see this continue for January. Happy with links to big blogs and would like to see more of this in the upcoming months, and some more success with Sphinn would be great.

Generally most of my targets were meet and would hoped to of seen a bigger increase in RSS feeds but 137 is still ok, and this may be an opportunity for another contest with a link to RSS feeds to assist in boosting the numbers.

Monetizing was expected to be lower as christmas was coming and I don’t see this improving much in January.

Popularity: 31% [?]

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December 31, 2007 | Filed Under Journal

Summary for January

Summary for November

Yeepage.com Goals for 2008

How to add No Follow to WordPress Blogroll

Summary for February

Comments

4 Responses to “Summary for December”

Anthony Lawrence on December 31st, 2007 11:15 pm

Congratulations on meeting your goals.

I’m interested in comparing your stats with mine.. in some ways we’re similar, but in other ways very different. For example, your Technorati stats are much, much better than mine, but I have about as much traffic in a day as you have in a month and consequently make much more from Adsense, etc.

Of course our niches are different too (some crossover, though), so that makes it hard to compare.

But it is interesting to follow this - thanks for sharing!
Simon on January 1st, 2008 3:23 am

Anthony Lawerence, blogging statistics are very hard to compare, as I have found out. I use Google Analytic and they only counts 1) pages that have google analytics on them 2) browsers that parse the javascript.

so mine might be much lower, when I compared to counterize 2 a wordpress plugin my statistics are 3 or 4 times better.

So be honest i set my benchmark against myself in Google so its easier for me to monitor my own progress, but i be interested to learn your tips if you have any
Anthony Lawrence on January 1st, 2008 3:48 am

The only “tip” I have is keep doing what you are doing. The reason I get so much traffic is simply that my site is older and has thousands and thousands of archive articles, so the search engines are bound to find something they like pretty regularly.

You are doing great stuff here: I’m sure it will pay off in time.
Anthony Lawrence on January 1st, 2008 6:00 am

One more thought: two places that bring various stats under one roof are

http://urltrends.com/viewtrend.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyeepage.com

and

http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php?url=yeepage.com

if you don’t already know about them..
moneytalks on January 2nd, 2008 12:10 am

As long it is increasing of traffic you are in the right direction. if you focus on credibility your blog will always rise to the top. since you got a lot of stumble upon that mean you are good. well done. i hope one day i will get stumbleupon traffic too. anyway good work and happy new year.