A Drop in Traffic

January didn’t start out too bad, but as the month continued, the traffic levels slowly dropped. It can be frustrating to see traffic levels decrease, especially since I had good traffic months leading up to December. There will always be ups and downs while managing a blog or website online, so I’ll just take this as one of the downs and move on.

Traffic Stats - January 2012
(Click to enlarge)

The graph above doesn’t look too good, especially comparing the traffic at the beginning of the month to the end of the month. I’m hoping that I can reverse the trend going forward, but it will require some more work and more publishing. Year over year, the traffic was still up as can be seen in the following table.

Unfortunately, I am just above 100,000 visitors for the month, and my target of 200,000 for the year end is looking like an unachievable goal. Still, I wil keep that target and will have to work a bit harder now to achieve that goal, but first I will need to reverse the downward traffic trend.

Traffic Sources

The largest drop, which can also account for most of my traffic drop last month, is with the search engines. I lost roughly 12,000 search engines visitors last month compared to the previous month, which accounts for almost the total drop in visitors for the month.

My traffic sources are shown below.

Traffic Sources - January 2012
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While the number of search engines visitors dropped, it still remained my largest traffic source, albeit, a bit smaller in terms of percent. When looking into a more detailed view of where the largest drops occurred, I notice that many of the pages were probably visited during the holiday season by people looking for information.

I’m hoping that the drop in traffic is only temporary, or that some of my newer posts will start ranking for some keywords to make up the difference. Time will only tell in that regard.

While my blog experienced a large drop in traffic last month, I am still optimistic that this trend will reverse over the next few months. When comparing my traffic from January 2011, I also noticed a drop during the month from December 2010. I won’t be taking any drastic steps to try and improve my traffic other than continue to publish content. I’ll have to continue to watch my traffic levels and evaluate the numbers going forward.

Related Posts

1. Traffic Stats: June 2011
2. Traffic Stats: July 2011
3. Traffic Stats: December 2011
4. Blog Traffic Stats – One Year Later

Traffic Stats: January 2012 is a post from: Technically Easy
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In fact, you need to have lot of it but sadly enough the world is not such a great place to stay inspired 24×7 and that means, you should have quick access to some sources of inspirations otherwise, you blog will be missing some genuine posts that might have shot it to fame. Here we are going to share some of the best places that may help you keep your readers engaged.

1. Score Forums

Contrary to popular perceptions, forums are not just a place to spam and get some back links for your website. Just kidding. Yes, forum is always buzzing with the presence and activity of people and that means, you need to participate in different forums that are genuine of course and you will be able to have a long list of idea and inspirations to stay cool for a month or two. You can take a different route if you are unable to locate any inspirational idea in your favorite forum. Try to create a list of questions webmasters are asking repeatedly and then create a post where try to provide answers to all these and it will be shot to fame without needing any marketing push from your side.

2. Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo answer is the only product from the house of yahoo that is still carrying its legacy even in this tough period. It has innumerable number of niches and thereby making it easier for you to target any particular niche and then keep on exploring that until you hit the nail. If you are dedicated enough, you will soon strike perfect gold and you will have enough information in your hand to keep your blog running for months to come. Just keep jotting down ideas as soon as you come across them and you will have a better world to live.

3. Social Networking Sites

Checking updates of your friend on Facebook or in other social media sites will have twin benefits for you. Firstly, it will relieve you of undue burden that you have been bearing for long for being not able to chat with your friends, not kidding, and secondly, you will have a fair idea of what your friends are thinking and you have some hints of a great post in the making. Great blogger just need some hints and they are quite capable of coming up with a great and engaging article with some hints and all that.

4. Read Some Great Books

Books are without any shreds of doubts is the most authentic source of keeping yourself inspired. Books offer much more in-depth information and therefore, you should try to read books at least one in a month. This will feed your perched brain with creative ideas that will help you stay inspired no matter what. Maintaining a perfect balance between your reading habit, and you would not bang your head against the desk in sheer desperation for not being able to produce any inspiring article.

Related Posts

1. 5 Ways to Build Traffic With Infographics
2. Ways to Boost Your Website Positioning Methods

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It is difficult to constantly raise traffic numbers each month, so I’m not too surprised with lower numbers in December. I feel the numbers were still fairly good, but I also know there is still a lot of work ahead of me to reach my target of 200,000 by the end of 2012.

Down But Not Out

Compared to November 2011, December 2011 didn’t start out as strong. The traffic numbers were down at the beginning of the month and for most of the month the number of visitors hovered just above 3,000 per day.

On Christmas day, however; I nice large traffic spike occurred and slowly decreased over the next few days. It was this traffic spike that produced traffic numbers that nearly matched November. The traffic spike was caused by increased activity from search engines, and can bee seen in the following chart.

Traffic Stats - December 2011
(Click to enlarge)

The numbers for December, while down compared to November 2011, were still a healthy increase from the previous year. The table below compares December 2010 to December 2011.

The number of visitors increase by just over 70% while the number of pageviews was almost 56%. Unfortunately, this also means that visitors were viewing less pages per visit than the previous year but overall both numbers were still a healthy increase.

Traffic Sources

In terms of traffic sources, search engines continue to dominate and have actually increased as a percentage of my overall traffic at just over 91%. The number of visitors from search engines, however; have decreased by almost 2,000 for the month compared to November.

My referral traffic was down also, and only accounted for just over 3% of my visitors for the month. Direct traffic was a distant second with just over 5% of the visitors arriving directly to Technically Easy.

The chart below shows the traffic sources breakdown for December 2011.

Traffic Sources - December 2011
(Click to enlarge)

December was a busy month so I wasn’t active online as much as I have been the previous months, which could explain the referral traffic. Now that the holidays have come and gone, I’ll look at ramping up my online activity in January.

While the traffic numbers for December were down I am not going into panic mode. I’ll take additional steps to increase my traffic throughout 2012 and try and reach my goal. I’ll have to be more active online to increase my referral traffic and look at other means of driving traffic to my blog. While the end of 2011 proved a little disappointing, I am pleased with how the traffic numbers grew throughout the year and am looking forward to an even better year in 2012.

Related Posts

1. Traffic Stats: November 2011
2. Traffic Stats: October 2011
3. Traffic Stats: May 2011
4. Traffic Stats: June 2011

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I am an advocate of regularly backing up data on my local computer and this same train of thought has also transferred over to managing my blog. I have read many stories of people losing their blog because something bad happened and they don’t have a backup to restore their blog’s data. BackWPup provides you with all the options needed to completely backup your blog automatically.

My WordPress Backup Experience

I am serious when it comes to data backup. The data stored on my personal computer is backed up on an external hard drive, a portable hard drive, and online. If anything was to happen to my computer, I am confident that I can recover my data from one of three physical devices.

I am just as serious when it comes to my WordPress blog’s backup. I had been using two plugins for over a year to backup my data: one plugin to backup my files, and another to backup and optimize my database.

Recently, however, I wanted to replace two plugins with only a single plugin – one that will backup both my WordPress files and database. I am always looking to reduce the number of plugins that I run on my blog, and this was an opportunity to do so.

I tried a few plugins that can backup my entire WordPress blog, but I ran into some issues. The biggest issue was the fact that I continuously ran out of memory, and increasing the amount of memory for PHP didn’t solve the problem.

The out of memory problem came down to the fact that the backup was almost 500 MB, and it appeared it was too much to backup in one shot.

This is where BackWPup was different that some other total backup WordPress plugins.

BackWPup – The Automatic Backup Safety Net

While BackWPup allows me to backup both my WordPress files and database, and does something else that helps me – it allows me to separate my WordPress backup into multiple jobs.

How does separating my WordPress backup in BackWPup help with my memory issues? Simple. Instead of running one job that backs up 500 MB, it runs several jobs that creates much smaller backup files, which are easier to handle.

BackWPup Backup Options

There are several options that you can use to backup specific portions of your WordPress blog.

BackWPup - Database Tables Backup
(Click to enlarge)

BackWPup allows me to create a separate job for each of the following:

1. Database. Backs up and optimizes my WordPress database.
2. Root. Backs up the root directory of my WordPress installation.
3. Content. The WordPress content directory, excluding the themes and plugins can be backed up.
4. Plugins. All the plugins can be backed up.
5. Themes. All the WordPress themes can be backed up.
6. Blog Uploads. The largest backup option – backs up the uploads directory.

BackWPup - File Backup Options
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By scheduling a job for each of the above options, I can now have BackWPup automatically backup my entire WordPress blog without having to worry about remembering to do it myself.

Many Backup Destination Options

After scheduling my backup jobs and having them run, I still needed a place to store the files. Obviously, storing them on my host is not an option, but I needed to find a safe and secure location, on that I know will reliably house my BackWPup WordPress backup.

BackWPup Destination Options

I decided to go with Amazon S3, mainly because it is reasonably priced, and quick. BackWPup works easily with Amazon S3, but it also works with many other solutions as well:

1. Backup to a Folder. This basically places your backup files into a folder on your host. While this may be a good temporary solution, it should be a long term one.
   
   

   BackWPup - Backup to a Folder
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2. Backup to E-mail. If BackWPup doesn’t create a large backup, then this could be a viable option.
   
   

   BackWPup - Backup to E-mail
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3. Backup to FTP Server. Simply sends your backup file to an FTP server.
   
   

   BackWPup - Backup to FTP Server
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4. Backup to Dropbox. A popular online backup location.
   
   

   BackWPup - Backup to Dropbox
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5. Backup to SugarSync. Another file sync and online backup solution.
   
   

   BackWPup - Backup to SugarSync
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6. Backup to Amazon S3. Another popular online storage location and one that I am currently using.
   
   

   BackWPup - Backup to Amazon S3
   (Click to enlarge)

7. Backup to Google storage. An onlone storage solution provided by Google.
   
   

   BackWPup - Backup to Google Storage
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8. Backup to Microsoft Azure (Blog). A backup online storage solution provided by Microsoft.`
   
   

   BackWPup - Backup to Microsoft Azure
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9. Backup to Rackspace Cloud. A cloud computing solution for backing up your WordPress blog.
   
   

   BackWPup - Backup to Rackspace Cloud
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With all the options for both backing up my WordPress files and database, as well as being able to provide many options for storing my backup files, I think that I will be using BackWPup for next little while.

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2. Find RSS Scrapers with the CopyFeed WordPress Plugin
3. WordPress Cache Plugin – W3 Total Cache
4. 4 WordPress Plugins to Help Protect Your Blog

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Create a Calendar of Articles

Some days are just more productive than the others. This does not mean though that you have to pour out your creativity all at once. Spread out your creative drive into different days. In fact, you could use your best writing days to map out the week ahead. It is a great time to schedule what you are going to write for the next seven days. Write all the titles and article prospects that pop out of your head. Later on, practice the habit of creating a weekly planner for your articles. This will keep you from getting stuck in the middle of the week without anything to write.

Theme it With the Holidays

Most likely, you have been asked many times before by your teacher to write how you spent your Christmas vacation. Holiday-themed writing has been there forever but it has not lost its appeal. You can always try writing about a holiday theme that suits the niche of your blog.

Search For Interesting News

As blogger, information is your best asset. And in case you do not know it yet, online news is one of the deepest information well you can get buckets of content from. Be on the alert of news keywords that are relevant to your niche. Find a way to discuss them in 450 words and that is already a new blog entry for you.

Don’t be Afraid to Ask For Help

If you are starting out and want a constant flow of quality articles, then do not hesitate to get someone to write for you. Hire writers online, let them know what you expect of them, and get the articles from them. If your blog is already doing fairly well, you can benefit from its popularity by encouraging guest writing. Start-up bloggers who can a good boost can get it from your site by writing for you and having their page linked to your site.

Take a timeout

Obviously, you do not want to be left behind in the grueling race for search engine ranking. But the best way you can rebound from a writing slump and come up with a fresh content is to take a little time off. Just give yourself enough time to rest but not too much that you would not want to go back anymore.

Related Posts

1. Blog Ad Networks: Quantity or Quality Traffic?
2. Great Tips for Blog Content Success
3. Preventing Duplicate Content in Search Engines With WordPress
4. Ten Tips to Improve the Quality of Your Technical Support Experience

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