2008-04-21 13:42 ☼ post
I’ve been monitoring axodys.com with Google Analytics since the big move to slicehost at the beginning of the month and so far the initial data isn’t too surprising. I’m averaging roughly 36 unique visitors and 57 page views per day. I have a few pages that get multiple hits from the search engines on a daily basis, but they’re fairly random niche posts from a long time ago that don’t really contribute to the direction I’m taking Axodys these days.
The big issue I’m currently facing as I reboot this blog is that I don’t have any significant topical pillar articles to attract the kind of traffic that generates a regular readership. That’s something I definitely need to focus on more now that I’m trying to move Axodys into more of the blogging, web development, social media and internet marketing niches. There’s plenty of opportunity to find things to write about in any one of those areas let alone all four.
While it’s not especially relevant towards building new traffic, looking at my stats to dtae revealed some interesting trends about which existing posts that are getting most of my traffic. Amusingly enough this Harry Potter Manga Illustrations post that I wrote almost 7 years ago ranks pretty highly on google for the phrase “Harry Potter Manga” and averages around 10 unique pages views per day. My second highest ranking page is for axodys.com itself with an average of 3 uniques per day. This Amazing Flash Site post and a Kubuntu PPC post both get a few unique hits a day to grab the third and fourth positions. Finally, rounding out the Axodys top 5 is a Honda Element Roof Rack post that is currently 10th on Google for that phrase and gets 1 or 2 hits per day. Incidentally, that post strikes me as one that would be interesting to monetize in some fashion.
One odd discovery I made while analyzing my stats was that I seem to have a pillar image in the form of a small widescreen Lebron Witness desktop I created last June after his big game against Detroit. It’s currently number three on google images for the phrase “lebron witness”. My initial reaction is that a pillar image is basically just a bandwidth sink, but I will have to investigate further and see if I can think of any ways to further take advantage of this phenomena.
The bottom line on of all this traffic analysis is that it’s really all about showing where I’m starting from as I make a concerted effort to improve things. Priority one on the blog improvement front is to focus on creating new pillar articles in useful and relevant areas that will attract and retain readers. As always, good content is still the key, but I think I can also be a little smarter about topics and seo techniques than I have been in the past. I think axodys.com does get a bit of a boost with google because of its longevity though so I’m going to continue to experiment with seo optimized titles and posts.
I don’t know if I will necessarily do axodys.com traffic related posts on a monthly basis, but I think I will continue to do them periodically so that I can show what kind of traffic growth progress (or lack thereof) I’ve made to date. If nothing else it should be a useful learning exercise to see what kinds of activities and strategies pay dividends when trying to grow a blog or web site in general.