Site Stats – April 2007
May 2, 2007 | Comments (14) | Filed under: General
When I started Bookmark Bliss in March of this year, my goal was basically to treat it as an experiment. I had never really done too much blogging, but I had a lot of experience with other web based business options and I wanted to start learning more about the blogging aspects. So far, the experience has been invaluable and I have learned many things that I have already applied to all aspects of my daily business.
Since it’s a learning experience for myself, much of our audience is also learning as well. One of my goals here is to keep things transparent on both the site and the business side of things to see just how this site does from month to month. We started last month reporting statistics, and so the trend continues this month as well. Here are the Bookmark Bliss statistics for the month of April 2007.
Posting/Comment Statistics
In the month of April, we posted 31 posts (just a little over one a day) and have had 301 comments posted in response. This is a big increase over last month and puts us at an average of 9.7 Comments per post. This is up from an average of roughly 5 comments per post last month. Our spam comments blocked also doubled this month to 1984.
Website Access Statistics
According to Google Analytics, for the month of April we received 72,560 unique visitors and more than 167,169 pageviews. On average, a single visitor viewed approximately 2.3 pages per visit. I’m actually pretty impressed by these numbers considering they are better than the month of March, which had 3 articles reach the front page of Digg. No articles made it to the front page of Digg in April.
Expense Statistics
Our current expenses are identical to last month. Since this site has been a real experiment, I haven’t really invested much into it. Our overall expense amount for this month is $9.00 breaking down our hosting cost and domain cost for the year to a one month cost.
Income Statistics
For the month of April, this site generated the following income in USD. Google Adsense: $58.65 and Affiliate Sales: $89.24 for a total of $147.89. This number is lower than last months income due to a couple of factors. First, we reduced the number of Adsense ads on our site by 3 in response to user feedback and we did not have any direct ad sales for the month.
Subscriber Statistics
This month, we managed to triple our subscribers from last months average of 150 subscribers to this months average of 475. This was one of my major goals for the month, and I think we are on track to keeping those numbers increasing significantly.
Other Statistics
Our Technorati ranking improved from 31, 641 last month to 11, 969 this month with more than 632 links from almost 300 blogs. Our Alexa ranking improved to 84, 921 and continues to climb steadily.
Overall, in every statistic but income, I think we have improved ourselves fairly well. I’m not overly concerned with the blog income and would much rather see our reader base continue to grow instead of our paycheck 
For the month of May, I have two major goals once again in addition to maintaining last months goal of improving subscriptions. This month, I am going to make a serious effort to drastically increase our number of inbound links. With the recent Google Pagerank update giving our site only a 3, I realized that I need to put in a much stronger effort into expanding our reach. My second goal for the month is to experiment a lot more with different ways to improve pageviews. I’d love to see new readers visiting more pages of our site when they visit. Hopefully for the month of May, I can increase our visits from a 2.3 to at least 3.0.
From a personal side of things, I’m going to try and make an effort to post consistently, but not forcefully in a daily sense. Some days there is just nothing to say and I plan to ensure our content is of higher quality instead of quantity. I’m perfectly fine with the pace we post at currently, but I want to make sure it is sustainable in the long run.
For those of you who are regular readers of the site, what would you like to see more from us? What are things we can change to make the site better? What do you like already and would like to see more of? Our user experience is our highest priority, so any suggestions you might have on how to make it better would be much appreciated.
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14 people have left comments
This is amazing! You started this blog in March and getting over 2400 unique visitors a day!
I wouldn’t worry about PR so much. Higher page rand doesn’t mean more visitors. I’ve seen PR6 sites with only 300-400 unique visitors a day and PR2 sites with 2000-3000 uniques/day. I would prefer to stay in the second category.
i would like to see more articles about getting traffic… on your blog
I agree with hem acharya,
In the post you mentioned:
Do you have a plan? That’s would be nice if you can share your experience.
yea ,I would be more happy to get more traffic than a higher PR. According to Analytics, it registered only 50 UV a day for my site.
I feel sad..
@Hem – As always, the more I figure out about generating traffic, the more I’ll talk about it. This blog follows my own experience and discovery in running a blog, so you’ll just have to be patient as I test out techniques. I’ve already posted several times things that have worked for me so far, and I don’t see that ending anytime soon…
@Laptop Repair – Last month, my goal was to increase subscribers. As the month progressed, I posted several articles on techniques I was implementing to accomplish those goals. The same will be for this month. As I formulate a game plan for increasing inbound links, I’ll definitely be posting my experiences…
Hi Stark,
A month ago, I turned on the RSS feed to my own blog. I’m not having nearly as much success as you are. That’s all right. I need to learn, persist in growing.
Not sure how I discovered your pithy blog/website, but I recall a week or so ago, you had a ton of stories posted on digg and they were all really helpful, so I dugg ‘em (my username there is nelanah).
You may already know this, but in case you don’t, you were featured in TagSociety.com’s blog. They don’t seem to use permalinks, so here is their post about your site.
“A Very Resourceful Business Blog
Posted on 03/20/07 by Tag Society
We recently stumbled upon FuzzyFuture.com, a blog about business online. The blog was recently launched at the beginning of this month, and so far every post has been very resourceful, with links to many other great websites to help business owners and webmasters.
Topics about blogging, social networking, ranking, marketing, seo, web design, and more are discussed on FuzzyFuture.com. Business owners and webmasters will definitely want to bookmark this blog.”
one of your many fans.
annieo
Hey Stark,
I just checked your April statistics on the Advertise with Us page. It looks like you had three huge traffic spikes in April. Do you know where the traffic was coming from?
That is still my March traffic on the advertise with us page. I still need to update it for this past month. In March, my 3 big spikes in traffic were all from social news sites. Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us.
March was my first month, so I used some link baiting articles to spread the news about my site and show people the type of content this site was generating.
I think the majority of our consistent readership that exists today originally came from those links…
Seeing your stats and google earnings is interesting, but it made me wonder… Isn’t Google not fond of people talking about the details of their earnings?
thats an impressive start to your blog. Congrats!
I think that the linkbait and social networks helped but if you dont have the content to back it up those kind of techniques only really add a small spike in traffic.
” …I think the majority of our consistent readership that exists today originally came from those links…”
Yes, Stark, that is very apparent.
I find when I post one of my entries to digg, I get way more hits. Yet, to keep people coming back to one’s blog, it really has to be engaging … informative, amusing, interactive, thoughtful … something that makes an individual want to come back.
You definiltely have both going for you.
I agree. Your Alexa statistics looks very impressive. Most bloggers spend many months or even years to a get a five digit number from Alexa.
Probably that’s why your income from Adsense was only $58.65 for 167169 pageviews. Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Del.icio users do not click ads and I believe when Google sees traffic from these sites, your AdSense CPM goes down.
I think you guys are misunderstanding a little bit. This article outlines my traffic for the month of April and my big spikes came in the month of March. I’ll try and get around to updating my graph this weekend, but basically April’s traffic to get the 167K pageviews was much more consistent with almost not spikes at all…
Like I said in the article, we didn’t get any of our articles on Digg, Reddit, Stumble, or Del.icio.us in the month of April.
@laptop: I think my Adsense numbers are down this month simply because I removed 2 of the prominent Adsense placements I had in March and with no articles making it big in the month of April, I never experienced any of the big $10-20 dollar a day Adsense spikes that they bring.
Well that’s pretty impressive. Well done to you!