Beginner Blogger

What a month August was! I was bed-ridden for almost 2 weeks with a case of the Swine Flu. Couldn’t believe it.

Beware this is a long post but I think it’s worth your while having a read, especially if you’re into stats and enjoy watching the progress of things – like blogs

Anyway, although I didn’t set myself any statistical goals for August it was clearly a dominating month. Bold Green indicates how much I beat last month by, and success. Bold Red indicates I did less than last month, or failure of a certain goal. So without further ado here are the stats for August 2009.

Twitter stats for August

Tweets – 123 (July 33). +90 total 156
Followers – 296, (July 62) +234 total 358
Following – 1228, (July 157) +1071 total 1385
Direct messages – 78, (July 21) +57 total 99
Mentions – 53, (July 13) +40 total 66

Twitter Notes and September Goals
The twitter stats were huge! I admit I probably spent most of my focus on twitter than anything else. I had aimed to get 150 followers, but I more than doubled that! It’s a really exciting and fun social media platform and I engaged with many people through twitter over the month of August. A large majority of my traffic to this blog was a result of my activity on twitter.

I still have a long way to learn about twitter and how to use it as effectively as possible. My goals for September won’t necessarily be about numbers, it will be more about providing quality ‘tweets’ and engaging with the people on my list and other people I find that I feel I can help.

I’m hoping through helping others and providing quality content on twitter I’ll be able to get more followers. I won’t be going crazy adding everyone and anyone I can as it may look based on the stats. I didn’t just add anyone though, the people I added were based on searches I used related to blogging that I feel were the right type of people for me to follow and that I felt could benefit from following me.

Facebook stats for August

Fans – 6, (July 0) +6 total 6

Facebook Notes and September Goals
I barely focused on my facebook account at all. I had a goal in mind to get about 5 fans but I didn’t devote any time to it apart from adding in the live feed to my blog, so this result really surprised me.

I don’t really have any goals in mind for September to do with facebook until I learn more about it. I am actually thinking I will change the URL of my facebook page and link it up to my personal account instead of the one I created just for beginner blogger.

So I may do a bit more reading about facebook fan pages this month but only if I find some time. Facebook is not a large focus for the month of September for beginner blogger.

Blog stats for August

Posts – 5, July 7 -2 (total 12)
Comments – 10, (July 6) +4 total 16 (excluding myself, pingbacks and spam)

Blog Notes and September Goals
This was a poor month in terms of content/posts for my blog. As a result my main focus this month is content generation. I have done quite a bit of planning of posts to come but I failed in delivering these posts to the blog.

I have been listening to people I have engaged with on twitter and other social mediums and I have a goal to produce 20 blog posts for the month of September.

A big focus for the blog in September is giving what my readers want, giving my readers what I would want and hopefully getting a reputation. It’s a big part of what this blog is about – engaging with the people that visit my site, but it’s a primary focus for September.

RSS stats for August

Subscribers –  2, (July 3) -1 total 5

RSS Notes and September Goals
Unfortunately I did not get many RSS subscribers this month as I had hoped. Perhaps this is an indication of the post quantity on my blog and quite possibly the quality also. I’m also unsure of how exactly the RSS stats work as the stats seem to show different results every day. Here is a screenshot of the last 30 days:

I set up subscription by email so that is now an option when you subscribe to the beginner blogger RSS feed.

My focus for September doesn’t really involve RSS subscribers however I am hoping that I gain more with an increase of posts for this month.

Google Analytics stats for August

Visitors – 435, (July 90) +345
Unique Visitors – 235, (July 52) +183
Visitors not from Brisbane (my home town) – 308, (July 62) +246 (Because my IP address changes and I check my site constantly on different computers I wanted a way to check my stats that didn’t include my visits)
Visitors not from Brisbane and time spent on site higher than 0 seconds – 102, (July 23) +79 (I wanted to see how many visitors came to my site that spent greater than 0 seconds on my site – i.e. the page fully loaded and they spent some time on the site. I’m not sure if this is entirely accurate)

Google Analytics Notes and September Goals
A significant increase in traffic this month I believe is mostly is due to my activity on twitter. More than 70% of my traffic came from twitter outside of my hometown Brisbane. Only 3% were from ‘organic’ traffic (from search engines).

For September I am hoping to significantly improve my traffic. For a blog that is over 2 months old I think the traffic I am getting is fairly low and feel I can generate a lot more. I would love to get a day where I get 50 visitors and generate an average over 20.

As you can see in the image above the blue line is August and green line is July. That peak in August was when I launched my new blog design and was telling people about it. It generated a bit of Buzz and I received my highest traffic in one day which was 36.

I think through creating more posts, telling people on twitter about my new posts I create, fixing up some SEO and engaging with my readers and other peoples blogs I will be able to reach my traffic goals for September.

Significant other things I did in August

* Brand new redesign What do you think? It caused some headaches but I think it has improved the site dramatically.
* Created a (free) email list. I have taken this down for now as I will be getting an Aweber account soon. Until I have that set up properly I will most likely set up the free email subscription box again. So please subscribe!
* Engaged with many wonderful and talented bloggers
* Signed up with Hootsuite This is a great twitter application. You thought TweetDeck was good, wait till you try this!
* Created video blog post

Goals for September

* 20 Blog posts
* 50 Quality Twitter ‘tweets’
* Comment on at least 10 other blogs
* Engage with people on Twitter and other blogs
* Fix current images on site – make sure all unique
* Add google adwords to sidebar
* Add categories to sidebar
* Email list back up
* Create/Organise contacts that I have made through this blog
* Polish off areas of site – Contact, Adverise, sidebar footer etc

September is going to be a huge month! Not only have I set myself a lot of goals for this blog I am also working on a completely new side project which I hope to share you with later on down the track. Also I am a big AFL fan here in Australia and it’s finals time in the month of September so I will be devoting a fair bit of my weekends to watching the game I love. Along with a full time job, fathers day and other events I am going to be extremely busy. Having said that Im’ excited and really looking forward to the challenge that this month will offer. Bring it on!

Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions regarding stats or anything else related to this post. I am happy to answer any questions

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Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – July-Aug 2009

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