The Retrospector

Problogger Darren Rowse posted today to give thanks to other blogs that send him traffic. I thought I’d comment a little bit about where my traffic was coming from and give a little credit where it’s due as well.

Starting out Traffic

It’s been kind of a neat experience to slowly watch my baseline traffic grow over time. (On weekends, I’m still getting 50+ hits a day) I get the weekly spike of traffic from the social bookmarking sites that are very deceiving on what my “real” traffic is, but I can tell by the logs that my base traffic is growing.

To give credit to the social sites, it does bring a lot of eyes to my content and opinions on what I have to say. I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum from those that love it and those that hate it. I don’t know how “sticky” social site visitors are over time, but 99% of them seem to go to just the single post page and leave right away. My main goal in using the social sites was to get general opinions of my content and style anyway. I have built up a small subscriber base from it though by looking at the feeds resulting from some of the posts that made it to social sites.

Other than the social sites, a little is coming in from search engines. I find it incredible how easy it is for people to find my links when searching for some of the words I figured would have thousands of results before my pages.

Blog Traffic Credits

These sources aside, the rest of my traffic comes from blogs. It’s not a very high %, but I’d say it’s between 5-10% of my overall traffic. Some praise the content, some don’t. Some are just from comments I placed on other blogs. Either way I’ll give traffic credit where it’s due:

• Problogger.net
• Anarchia.org
• Moshez.livejournal.com
• 10000birds.com
• ladyanneblunt.blogspot.com
• Chronosynclastic Infundibulum
  
• bjornhaug.com
• canimakebigmoneyonline.com
• rylowry.com
• thatedeguy.com

Conclusion

So there you have it. I thank everyone out there for linking to my site. The whole blogging experience is really maintaining its excitement. I look forward to doing this every so often to return a little link love to those that shared in the first place. Where are your traffic sources? Do you have a good number of referring blog sources feeding your site? What % of the traffic comes from other blogs?

Tags: traffic, sources, credit

Funny thing this is. About one month ago I decided to start this blog. I’ve got some pretty reasonable goals in mind from what I can tell by the feedback in the group writing project I participated in on blogging goals. I certainly didn’t expect the kind of results that I had, and I’ll probably be the next edge case that has a little more attention for awhile before everyone moves on to the next flavor of the day that made more money than it should have.

Types of income

I’d like to take a second to point out the types of income that a blog can have. The key here is that there’s more than one kind. The $88.51 did not come from just direct methods, but some indirect methods as well. (Direct methods being advertising income, or anything on the site that generates money. Indirect methods being income that generates because of your blog or as a result of having it.)

The breakdown

I know everyone’s first curiosity lies with where the money came from. I’ll give a general breakdown and explain a little about the indirect earners.

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The last couple days I’ve been experiencing some pretty heavy comment spam on my site. Two things come to mind when I see this.

1. If spammers are seeing my site, then so are readers! My site must be reaching a popularity threshold that merits spammers to want to fill my site with their links! Yay!
2. Oh great, now I’m getting 50+ comments a day in my posts all about things I don’t even want to mention let alone have all over my comments list. It’s going to take me forever to monitor that every day.

So, there’s a good side and a bad side to comment spam as I see it. Mostly bad as far as having to deal with it, but at least it’s telling me something about my blog.

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Another project has surfaced at Problogger.net this week. Darren challenges everyone to come up with their blogging goals and post about them for all to see. I enjoyed participating in the last project (Habits of Effective Blogging) and look forward to the results of this project as well.

Keeping goals dynamic

Blogging goals for me may not be as aspiring as the many others that read Problogger. Perhaps it’s because I have no trouble changing my goals over time as circumstances change. The following are my current goals, but over time if opportunities present themselves I wouldn’t be afraid to modify them into more aggressive goals.

These are very realistic to me for now as I’m currently a very busy with my family and career. Being realistic is one of the most important parts about setting goals with blogging. Those setting goals without a sense of reality are more likely to give up. Sure, I’d like to be a six-figure blogger…but a more realistic (perhaps short-term is a better word) goal is to just not lose money.

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