It’s the first of the month (more or less) so let’s take a quick look at some of the stats for my photography tips blog.
Later we’ll discuss why these things are important in establishing yourself as a new media artist. I’m not talking a new medium, I’m talking about an artist that is using new media (blogs, micro-blogs, social media networking) to bring attention to your creative vision.
The truth is i didn’t start tracking everything properly right off the bat. So it’s really hard to judge how successful/unsuccessful my blog was in the first few months. I was testing various tracking codes and not utilizing the right tools to properly optimize my website.
So we’ll just start looking back a month from now and when applicable I’ll give rough estimates for the previous month.
Reader subscriptions
- Today Sep 02 2008 – 523
- Aug Peak – 551
- Aug 03 2008 – 477
- July Peak – 480
Daily Traffic Google Analytics
- Today Sep 02 2008 – 163
- Aug Peak – 236
- Aug 02 2008 – 198
- Aug Monthly Total – 4,499
- July Peak – 9,743*
- July Monthly Total – 15,248**
Those are the bare bones stats for the website. There are plenty of other things and tools you could track but I feel that minimizing how often you check your stats and sticking with tools that are somewhat consistent will help you “figure out” what is working and what isn’t.
My Analysis
I’ll take a 10% rise in subscriptions any month. You could really push this further by holding contests and getting gimmicky, but I prefer to let it grow organically. Think tortoise not hare.
The visitor stats were pretty flat with not much increase which might discourage one as a “bad month”, but you have to consider a couple things.
- Everybody in the blogosphere that wasn’t blogging about the Olympics had to compete with that attention.
- Summer is a notoriously slow time for blog growth as people are on vacation and tend to travel more
- Summer is also slow because good weather tends to push people outdoors and encourage an active lifestyle instead of lurking in front of a computer all day.
Given those circumstances I’m fine with visitor stats being flat throughout the summer months. I’ve heard of some bloggers whose visitor stats drop significantly every summer.
What’s next?
- Increase the number of subscribers organically by continuing to post on a consistent basis providing quality content.
- Finish series “16 Quick Tips For New Photographers and begin to encourage guest posts from other photography bloggers.
- Do at least on guest post for another blog this month.
- Continue to build social media network contacts and encourage incoming links from other blogs.
*The rather large number of visitors on this peak day was a strategic post on photographing fireworks a few days before the 4th of July. Obviously it worked well as it picked up quite a bit of steam from StumbleUpon.
**If you subtract the peak day of 9,743 from the monthly total of 15,248 you’ll get 5,505 for a new total. Furthermore there was a considerable up-shift on July 3rd, 4th, and 5th which, if flattened to a more steady flow would actually leave the monthly total in the 4,031 ball park, indicating an actual increase in daily visitors for the month of Aug 2008.
