The month of April was my best month for traffic on Technically Easy. I have been getting more involved with commenting on other blogs, and being more active on social networks. The results of my efforts are slowly paying off. In the process, I have also learned about many new great blogs that I have been visiting on a regular basis, so I see my blog commenting/social media blitz as a win-win situation.
Also, starting in January, I have also been publishing five times a week, instead of the usual once or twice. The result is that with more content, I am seeing more traffic from search engines for keywords that are related to my new posts.
Month Traffic Comparison
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The graph above shows the traffic comparison for April 2011 (blue line) and April 2010 (green line). I am quite happy with the increase in traffic year-over-year as can easily be seen in the graph.
The actual monthly numbers between April 2011 and April 2010 were:
| Metric | April 2010 | April 2011 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits | 39,990 | 67,880 | 69.74% |
| Pageviews | 51,823 | 94,489 | 82.33% |
Both visits and pageviews showed a nice healthy increase year-over-year. In April 2011, Technically Easy averaged over 2,200 visits and 3,150 pageviews a day. While I didn’t crack 100,000 pageviews for the month, I am hoping to do so within the next few months.
Traffic Sources
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As it has been for the past few years, search engines are the main source of traffic for my blog, with direct traffic and referring sites comprising of about 16% of the traffic. I am not a SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I do try to follow the basic SEO advice with regards to creating page titles, URL, content, and the meta description.
Much of my search engine traffic is generated from a few “how-to” posts that I have written a few years ago, and I am planning on writing more in the coming months.
April 2011 Changes
The biggest change was I decided to stop testing various themes for Technically Easy. I became annoyed with myself for changing the theme so many times over the past few months, so I created a new theme based on an existing one.
The current theme will probably be around a while, as I like the look of it, and it provides a good ratio of content to sidebar area. This theme was a result of studying various themes from different sites and blogs, and incorporate what I liked into a single theme.
Going Forward
In terms of the immediate future, I am hoping to continue the five days a week publishing schedule, which will include guest posts and articles written by myself. Wednesdays and Fridays are days in which I will only publish articles written by myself, while the other three days are open to guest posting.
I will also be looking at creating a guest posting policy and publishing it on my blog this month as I have noticed many guest posters don’t reply to comments that are left on their post. This will need to change going forward.
Blog commenting and social network usage will continue as it has the last several months, and I am looking forward to discovering many new blogs and bloggers.