Blog Statistics Update September – October 2013
This was kind of a weird month. Traffic was way down, but comments were quite a bit higher than usual. I find the comments more personally fulfilling, but for general blog growth (and getting more commenters) I want traffic to increase. Alexa also dropped a lot (that’s the desired direction) but MozRank decreased a little (not the desired direction).
Analytics Data from September 16 to October 15, 2013
People who listen to us, as of October 15, 2013:
RSS subscribers: 151 (too many false fluctuations to bother recording change)
Twitter followers: 607 (+41)
Facebook fans: 39 (no change)
Rankings:
Alexa: 75,349 94,152 (-15,967)
Google PR: 3 (no change)
MozRanks: 4.99 and 4.81 (-0.11)
Some Google Analytics statistics:
Popular Posts
Most viewed posts:
1) What Do You Consider a Good Salary?
2) Average Clothes Spending and Pattern
3) The 3 to 6 Month Emergency Fund
4) What Is the Purpose of an Emergency Fund?
5) Carnival of Financial Independence 30th Edition
Most Commented Posts:
What is the Purpose of an Emergency Fund?
The 3 to 6 Month Emergency Fund
Aspiring to Make Money from Our Closet Has Wasted Emotional Energy
Perfect Articulation of Plastic as Real Money for Young People
Earnings
This has gone on forever, but we actually have our Adsense earnings up over $100 and we finally added our bank account information… But we haven’t actually received the payment yet. It’s coming, though!
I am actually disappointed that no one has signed up for one of the credit cards I wrote about this month. 🙁 My goal was to get one sign-up. I guess I was too late to the party or our audience isn’t right for pushing credit cards – I’ve never tried it before. But we are really enjoying the card. 🙂
Search Terms
“too many target gift cards wedding” – most people would not characterize that as a problem! even if you don’t live near a Target you can shop online.
“being a graduate student is awful” – only intermittently, I hope.
“when a doctor sees you naked” – wow, off-topic
love for the grad students who are saving for the future:
“student earned income and roth ira contribution rules”
“can i make ira contributions with an nsf fellowship?”
“retirement plan for grad student”
“as a graduate student should i have a roth ira”
“can graduate student on stipend fund a roth ira?”
“roth ira fellowship income”
“grad student no earned income alternative to ira”
“how to save for retirement in grad school”
“income from fellowship 401k”
“is fellowship eanred income for roth contribution”
Which do you find more satisfying as a blogger, high comments or high traffic? How have you been able to increase affiliate income?
Filed under: blogging, month in review · Tags: comments, traffic
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I agree that it is more personally fulfilling to get comments and interact with the readers who actually take the time to stop by and write a comment. That being said, before I had a blog I never commented on another persons blog really, so I think it is two VERY different things. And to grow the numbers/traffic it needs to go beyond the community of bloggers.
I get no traffic to my site really because I have yet to do carnivals (and because it currently is ugly on blogspot – but I am in the process of transferring to self-hosted). Yesterday I got close to 200 page views coming in from Mr. Money Mustache, (that is higher than any single day for me) and I didn’t get one comment from those – just one awesome comment from another blogger.
Alicia @ Financial Diffraction recently posted..figuring out my investment style.
I basically started this blog because I was commenting more and more on some other PF blogs and I wanted to participate more in the community.
That’s a sweet link from MMM! Too bad no one wanted to pipe in, though. I’ve seen something similar from a link someone put to my blog in the MMM forum and the links The Simple Dollar gave me. Well, I do have random pop-in/non-blogger commenters often enough that perhaps they did come from those sources but I couldn’t pinpoint them.
It’s really interesting to see your stats! My Facebook page is not doing great at all but Twitter is steadily growing. Have you ever tried attracting traffic through Google+ or Pinterest? I don’t use either of these channels but have been considering.
Hayley @ A Disease Called Debt recently posted..Friday’s Fab Links #13
Nope, I don’t use Google+ or Pinterest in my personal life so I’m not prepared to learn them for blogging!
I also prefer comments to traffic. Of course, both are nice! I also feel that when you’ve “made it” as a blogger is when you start getting regular comments from people who aren’t also bloggers.
My first AdSense payment took forever to arrive. It was well over a week from the time they said they sent it to the time it actually was in my bank account.
Edward Antrobus recently posted..Swagbucks is More than Just Getting Paid to Search
We were thinking that maybe Adsense only pays out on a once-per-month schedule and maybe we missed getting our info in by the most recent date? Is that the case? Because we couldn’t see anywhere we were supposed to request a payment.
Thanks for sharing these metrics. We haven’t monetized yet, but I still like seeing comments and pageviews increase.
Hopefully someone will sign up for your cards, and congrats on getting some income from adsense! Would you recommend us trying that on our blog, or is the juice not worth the squeeze?
Done by Forty recently posted..Do Credit Cards Actually Increase Spending?
The juice isn’t much but IMO neither is the squeeze. I don’t mind seeing banner ads on blogs so I’m OK with them being on EPF. It was never my intention to be ad-free so I think putting them up early is OK as long as you don’t make things look too cluttered and you aren’t expecting much revenue. I have heard the argument that you should “get your readers used to seeing ads” early but I can’t imagine our readers care much about the sort we’ve put up. If we can figure out how to do affiliate income better the real estate may be better used for those types of ads than Adsense, in which case we’ll switch, but for now getting a little from Adsense is better than nothing from affiliate.
Congrats on the Adsense earnings! That’s great – and I second Done by Forty, what is your opinion on that route to monetization? (Is that even a word? My spell check doesn’t think so..)
Kali @ CommonSenseMillennial recently posted..#FinCon13 and Financial Goals, Big and Small
I think Adsense is easy but it won’t get small blogs a lot of revenue. To me having banner ads is very unobtrusive, though. I just try to think of what I like to see/don’t like to see as a reader of other blogs and do what I think is least annoying here.
Didn’t Google just have some big update? I’m not really up on this stuff but that could explain the change in traffic.
Matt Becker recently posted..Active Investment Managers Just Can’t Win
Maybe several months ago. Our traffic was quite a bit higher last spring. I need to figure out how to regain that search traffic but I’m too busy at the moment!
On a side note, I hope you keep publishing some of the wacky search terms you get each month. I actually look forward to seeing these each month because they are usually very entertaining. 🙂
S. B. recently posted..Historical Dividend Yield Charts
Aw, thanks! I enjoy looking through them while writing these posts. Sometimes they make me feel like the searchers are really “getting it” and some of them are very disheartening, like about financial problems leading to divorce. 🙁
Interestingly, I do love comments, but I still watch stats. I know there’s a lot of lurkers, based on the stats. I also am not too worried that I comment some places, and not others, and that not everywhere I comment do I get comments back – that seems more authentic to me than than always commenting on everything a certain person writes – if that makes sense. If it’s too reciprocal, it’s hard to know if you content is really that good.
I’m not that great with page views, so much so a sponsor retracted :p Doesn’t worry me, I blog for the enjoyment and the documenting of my life, rather than earning money.
SarahN recently posted..The dilemmas of buying clothes
It’s hard for me to tell who is a consistent lurker and who just reads all posts but only comments occasionally. I would love to find out that there are consistent readers who never comment! (And in fact every once in a while someone I know IRL will let me know she reads regularly, which I love hearing!)
That’s nice that you are blogging for yourself but can (occasionally) make money off it as well. As long as you aren’t in it for the money you won’t be disappointed.
I love getting comments to my blog posts, but I’m selling advertising based on traffic, and usually more traffic means more comments too 🙂
So I’m focusing now on getting the traffic up. It’s slowly growing, which makes me pretty happy 🙂
dojo recently posted..Freelancing: How much money do you need to start freelancing?
I don’t think comments increase linearly with traffic – comments mostly come from other bloggers. Sometimes I read “big” blogs that get tons of traffic and it’s crickets in the comments section. But ideally we would have both!
I’m really excited for you they you got the $100 from Adsense. I’m at about $50 in my account, but $32 is from this month alone, so it’s looking promising! I find comments more satisfying than just page views, but comments also create more work. I like to respond to everyone that comments, then go to their site and comment on their posts. It’s a good way to engage readers, but it’s also time consuming!
Cash Rebel recently posted..You’re poor because you made bad decisions
Well done getting that Adsense check! I know it can feel like an eternity.
I’m thinking perhaps traffic is preferable, because after about 25 comments, generally everything is covered and it make start getting repetitive. Given I feel the need to respond to all comments that warrant responding, it’s a lot of work and for some reason my posts get a lot of comments.
Polls have helped reduce the comments and encourage readers to participate.
Cheers
Financial Samurai recently posted..The Best Strategies To Get Out Of Debt And Become Happier In The Process
Yes, comments can get repetitive, but I like getting to know the commenters so I don’t mind!
I just hopped over from GRS. Thought I’d take a peek here. I think you might find this article interesting.
http://www.jdroth.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-blogging/
Thanks for linking to that post, but I’m not sure what message you are sending me? Do you think that my content needs improving? Or are you advising me to chill out?
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