Last month my blog had experienced a few issues, which in the end affected the amount of traffic to my blog. The issues involved my blog experiencing downtime throughout the month. For the most part the downtime was between a few minutes and less than an hour, there was a longer downtime that had an impact on my traffic levels.
Besides the downtime, which I will explain below, my traffic throughout September was pretty consistent, but I am always striving to consistently increase my traffic each month.
Blog Downtime Issue
Before I get into the issue with my blog experiencing downtime, lets look at traffic levels through September 2011 for Technically Easy.
Traffic Stats - September 2011
(Click to enlarge)
As you can see from the above chart, the traffic levels were fairly consistent except for September 13th and 14th. Excluding those dates, the amount of traffic that Technically Easy received was good and comparable to the previous few months.
For September, the traffic numbers were as follows, along with a comparison with a year ago:
| Metric | September 2010 | September 2011 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits | 53,416 | 86,895 | 62.68% |
| Pageviews | 71,341 | 117,506 | 64.71% |
The one thing that I am noticing is my year-over-year increase isn’t has high as it was for the previous few months, but near the end of last year my traffic numbers were increasing. This may mean that going forward the increases will start to become lower. I don’t mind as long as there is a good year-over-year increase.
On September 13th something was changed on my host and my blog went offline. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize the problem until about midday the next day, so my blog had been down for almost 24 hours.
I’m not really too sure what had caused the problem, but I used the Live Chat feature for my host and about an hour later the problem was corrected. Not only was my traffic affected, but my earnings for those two days was also impacted. This incident also reminded me that it is important to check on your blog once in a while to ensure everything is up and running.
Traffic Sources
The one consistency with my blog that I have seen for the past few years is the sources of my traffic. Search engine traffic accounted for over 87% of the visits to my blog, with direct traffic coming in second at 6.62% and referrals in third at 5.69%. The chart below shows the breakdown.
Traffic Sources - September 2011
(Click to enlarge)
While I have been looking for ways to increase my direct and referring traffic numbers, I am still happy with the amount of traffic from search engines. My only concern is that if search engines change their algorithm and my pages don’t rank as well, I could lose a significant portion of my traffic.
I’ll have to continue to work on other traffic means, but in the mean time I’ll continue to increase my traffic numbers of next month.
Tags: Blog Analytics, Blog Traffic, Traffic Stats
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on October 3, 2011 at 8:26 am
This statistic clearly shows that your blog is getting more and more exposure. Congrats for success.
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on October 4, 2011 at 9:15 am
Thanks. Getting more exposure is my goal.
Paul Salmon recently posted…Mobile Phone Security: How a Hacker Can Listen to Your Calls
on October 3, 2011 at 10:10 pm
Despite of some downtime, I still found that your blog’s doing a really great job there. Congratulations!
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on October 4, 2011 at 9:16 am
I was happy that the downtime didn’t have any long-lasting affect to my traffic levels as I also experienced minor downtimes throughout the month as well.
on October 3, 2011 at 10:41 pm
Yes, I observed that your blog had a decrease on amount of traffic based on the traffic stats. But it seems that your traffic had recover after having downtime. I wish I could be able to regain my traffic since I also experience decrease of traffic to my website. It seems nice that you consistently strive to increase traffic each month and good luck with your blog.
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on October 4, 2011 at 8:13 am
I have had a few downtimes over the past year. While they are annoying, my traffic doesn’t seem to be affected in the long term. Since much of my traffic seems to come from search engines, it tends to rebound once my blog is back online.
on October 4, 2011 at 7:39 am
The fact that your traffic seems to have such steady traffic is something that I find particularly interesting.
For all of my sites, my traffic almost looks like waves that follow the weekdays exactly.
For any given week, I peak around Wednesday and valley on the weekends.
Could this be a function of our niches perhaps???
Mark
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on October 4, 2011 at 8:12 am
It could be a function of our niches. The articles that do the best on my blog are technical tutorials, which people seem to search for each day. I don’t have too much news-related posts, so my posts tend to generate traffic for a few years after they are published.
on October 4, 2011 at 9:13 am
Your site has a lot of traffic coming from search engine and also the increase from year to year is pretty massive. I wish my site would have your traffic but it is still have much to work until I go there.
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on October 4, 2011 at 9:17 am
It took me four years to get to this traffic level, and a lot of learning with regards to SEO. Over time the more I was engaged online, and the more my content was shared the more search engine traffic my blog received.
on October 4, 2011 at 12:35 pm
Congrats Paul … Hope TE gets a lot more exposure
Also I agree with your words that one should check his blog once in a while to ensure that it is up
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on October 4, 2011 at 1:17 pm
Checking for the downtime is very important. The funny thing about that is I use Pingdom to monitor my blog, and I remember seeing an e-mail from Pingdom when my blog went offline, but I had accidentally deleted it. I’ll need to be more careful in the future.
on October 6, 2011 at 12:38 am
I have the same ratio of traffic on my own blog where about 80% comes from search engines and I see fluxes in articles which cause dramatic shifts of +-5% or more for a month due to one article losing search traffic and another taking its place or close enough.
Though I think Organic search is the best kind of traffic I think an ideal ratio is 50/30/20 to account and be able to absorb and survive such an algorithm shift or potential search result drop if one should occur.
SU continues to be my top referrer and I get over 5k visits per month usually from StumbleUpon without stumbling more than maybe 5 of my own articles in 30 days tops, and I usually post about 45-50 articles in 30 days so shows you that you really can jump on it if you take some time to invest in SU. I also see a higher # of clicks per 1,000 users from Google+ compared to Facebook or Twitter, though Twitter is still my most commonly used network.
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on October 6, 2011 at 9:39 am
I agree with the ratio, although it is hard get direct and referring traffic sources to that level, especially for a site that gets a good amount of search engine traffic. I have used StumbleUpon on occasion, and I do get some good traffic from them from time to time.
The only thing that I find with traffic from sites like StumbleUpon is that it is sporadic in that it could be good from one day, but then drop to nil the next. Still, I guess it is traffic after all.
on October 6, 2011 at 8:55 am
Wow… more than 2800 visits/day.. My blog only get 100/day visit average
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on October 6, 2011 at 9:41 am
100 visitors a day is still a good number. It took me several years to get to2800/day, but I have seen sites get to that level much quicker. I find that the more I publish, and participate online, the faster my traffic increased.
on October 6, 2011 at 6:20 pm
Don’t worry about the traffic , just keep writing unique articles ,google loves it
regards Jack
on October 6, 2011 at 11:24 pm
Heya Paul,
Those are great traffic stats. I hope you cross the 100K mark, quite soon. Good luck!
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on October 8, 2011 at 10:27 pm
Thanks, Adbulqader. I’m hoping to cross the 100K visit mark soon, as well.
on October 8, 2011 at 5:56 am
Nice stats bro, am targeting 3K visits withing two months, Hope I will do better.
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on December 10, 2011 at 4:24 am
Nice stats bro, am targeting 3K visits withing two months, Hope I will do better.
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on December 12, 2011 at 8:30 am
Gaining visitors takes time. It took me four years to get to my current traffic level.