First Month of Blogging (part 1): Stats
In my first post, Bookmark My Blog Launch: Goals, I said this:
As time goes on I will post some practical, behind the scenes statistics about BMB so you can get ideas for your own blog. I will include stats about traffic, subscribers, popular posts, favorite plugins, and any other practical advice I can give. Hopefully you will find this useful as you embark on a blogging adventure yourself.
During my first month, I kept a relaxed workload so I had plenty of time to work out any problems I had with the design and functionality of Bookmark My Blog. I focused on getting some good content so that I would begin getting relevant traffic.
First Month Stats:
- Hits- I averaged 25 hits per day, and I got 767 unique views this month (excluding myself and search bots).
- Comments- Thanks to Akismet, I didn’t have to sort through the 67 spam comments that I received this month. I have 9 legit comments (including my responses) and 3 trackbacks (so far all from BMB).
- Most Popular Posts- The posts that got the most traffic this month are Building Community: 5 Practical Ways to Encourage your Readers to Come Back, What Sets You Apart From Your Competition?, and Writing Your First Blog Post
- Subscribers- So far, I only have 3 subscribers. If you don’t get many feed subscribers or twitter followers for a while after launching, don’t get discouraged. It always starts out slow, but as it picks up speed your subscriber count will spike.
- SEO- Besides several searches
for “bookmark my blog” and “josh mcbride’s blog” from people that I told about BMB, I got several relevant searches including “writing the first blog post” and “how to update WordPress core”. - SMO- I installed the Sharebar plugin so that people could share posts on Facebook and Twitter. This month, only one of my posts were shared on Facebook, but I managed to get 16 hits from that one share.
- Plugins- I have 17 plugins installed on Bookmark My Blog. If you subscribe or follow me, I will notify you when I post “Top 12 WordPress Plugins for 2011″.
Keep in mind, these stats and goals will be different for your blog depending upon your topic, your audience, and your sources of traffic. Hopefully you will find this information useful and inspiring as you watch my progress, and learn from my successes and failures.
2 Comments
Sarah Elisabeth on July 15, 2011
Hey Josh, congrats on BMB’s first month! Thanks for sharing your data and all the info. Great stuff.
Sarah
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Josh McBride on July 15th, 2011
Thanks Sarah, I’ve had so much fun working on BMB. Hopefully, I will be able to devote more time this coming month to promoting BMB so I can ramp up my traffic and subscribers.
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