Gaining more blog traffic, a 30 day adventure in blogging – Day 1

As promised, the second installment in “Gaining more blog traffic, a 30 day adventure in blogging.” As I said yesterday, I’m going to be using the tools available on the Internet, along with tips from other bloggers, to see just how much of an increase in traffic I can manage in 30 days time. Since yesterday was just the announcement, we’re going to start the count today.

The two blogs I’m applying these methods to are this blog and my cooking blog. For any real test of traffic improving, you have to start with baseline numbers. In other words, if you don’t know what kind of traffic you’ve been getting, there’s no way to tell if you’re improving, so let’s start there.

The tools I’m using to gauge traffic to these sites are Open Web Analytics for WordPress and FeedBurner’s feed statistics. Both tools are free, and I’ll discuss them in more detail later today. You can use whatever tools you like for statistics monitoring, but I prefer OWA because it’s actually attached to the site and doesn’t rely on any third party server being contacted. If you choose to use something else, I’d recommend Google Analytics. Google’s service provides a lot of features at the same price (free), though it can be a bit cumbersome to use, and I honestly don’t care if my graphs are displayed in Flash or not.

To determine an average visitor count, I chose a report on the last 30 days of activity. This date range is fine, since it does not include any days where my traffic was inconsistently high. (like the few days I topped 1,400 visits a day for this post, when it was featured on a very popular site.) If you’ve experienced a few incredibly high traffic days, the best thing to do is simply remove those numbers, then go add the numbers for an equal number of days from the preceding totals. (This assumes you already have traffic, of course. but since I’ve had monitoring on both sites for well over 30 days, it makes getting a real benchmark easier.)

For the numbers: OWA gives me the following breakdown for Cooking by the seat of my Pants!: (Click the thumbnail for a screenshot of the actual OWA output)

Visits: 2097
Pages/Visit: 3.25
Unique Visitors: 1551
New visitors: 1434
Repeat Visitors: 645

The important numbers for this benchmark are the Visits field and the Unique Visitors field. These tell us where our baseline is, or they will in a few moments. The other fields are important as well, but not to this experiment. I’ll discuss why you need to have this information in my entry on OWA.

So we know we’re looking at 2079 visits over the last 30 days, and of those visits, 1,551 of them have been unique visitors, which means that they are different people (or clients) that have visited this site. What we really need is the average of both visits per day and unique visitors per day if we’re going to properly gauge any increase. Luckily the math for this is pretty straightforward:

Hey! You didn’t tell us we were going to have to do math!!!

Sorry, it’ the only way this is going to get figured out. please read on…

number / days we’re averaging across = average

or, for average visits:

2079 / 30 = 69.3 visitors per day, on average.

That number may look a bit low, but it’s easily proven, and when you look at the analytics chart, you’ll notice that there are days where the actual visitor count was much lower than 69. Other days were much higher as well, so I’m calling this an accurate benchmark. Using the same formula, we can determine that the average number of unique visitors per day for the past 30 days was 51.7.So, on day one we start with the knowledge that we’re trying to increase traffic counts from 69.3 visitors per day, and we want more than 51.7 unique visitors every day at the end of our 30 day period.

So, averages, by blog for our initial benchmark set:

Cooking by the seat of my Pants!: 69.3 visitors per day, 51.7 unique visitors per day.
the Spun Puppy: 2.84 visitors per day, 1.57 unique visitors per day.

Please note, the Spun Puppy is a very new blog, and increasing traffic to it is going to be a LOT easier than it is for a more established site like Cooking by the seat of my Pants!

Now that we know where we’re starting from, we can check back over the course of this process and see if there has been an average improvement in readership. If you’re playing along at home, I seriously suggest that you get a baseline for yourself before you begin any serious attempt at increasing traffic. Without it, you may find yourself discouraged when you really don’t need to be. All blogs will have periods of lower than average traffic, but the overall numbers dip far more slowly than daily totals do.

I hope you found this useful. In the next installment in this series, I’ll lay out the tactics I’ll be using to get an increase in traffic, which is what we all really want, isn’t it?

Popularity: 1% [?]