Traffic

This was the first full month that my blog has been active. Last month I generated over 10,000 pageviews and over 6,000 unique visitors. This month I had 20,000 unique visitors and almost 24,000 pageviews.

The total number is somewhat deceiving though, as you’ll find out later on how much of that traffic was generated from one site.

My new vs. return visitor rate was only 4.8%, but also because I had a huge spike in traffic from one site. Looking at the last 10 days of the month, I was at about 13.8%, which is much better (but not as high as I’d like). This number will continue to be lower than I want due to the fact that I’m just growing my traffic and readers.

Monetization

As I mentioned in last months review, this blog is not meant to subsidize income just yet. In fact, I removed most of the AdSense ads from the page other than one on each page. I did add Kontera in-text links though.

AdSense brought in a whopping $8.12 on 23,000 impressions with just 16 clicks. That gives me a $0.35 eCPM That also means that each click averaged about $0.50, which isn’t too shabby. As traffic starts to grow and I really try and optimize for ads, I hope to see the total number get much larger.

Kontera brought in $3.51 on 19,186 impressions with 57 clicks giving a $0.18 eCPM. I’m told that Kontera gets better over time, and I have seen the eCPMs go up higher towards the end of the month when there are clicks.

Another thing to note for the lower CTR is the fact that the posts that generated the majority of the traffic were picture-based. This means there is not much Kontera advertising going on, and people will be more likely to skip over text links from Google.

RSS Subscribers

Last month I said that I wanted to have 100 RSS subscribers, well I peaked this month at 257 in one day. It was the day after a huge traffic spike though, but I’d say average numbers are now in the 60-70 range, about 10-30 higher than last month. I’m really hoping these numbers continue to grow.

Search Engine Goodness

There was a massive improvement in search engine results this month. I finally have a Google PageRank, it came up as a 3/10…not bad. In March I had 176 unique visitors as a result of search engine traffic. In April this number increased by 260% with 678 unique visitors. Here were the top 10 keywords:

• invest in powercast
• powercast ipo
• powercast invest stock
• powercast invest
• e92 m3
• stumbleupon
• david pitlyuk
• fast times indoor carting
• virginia mansions
• www.nevblog.com

As you can see, my post on Powercast being the next multi-billion dollar idea got a good amount of search engine love….apparently I’m not the only one that thinks it’s a great idea.

Popular Pages/Content

This was the top 10 most popular content on this blog for the month:

1. A Raunchy Dora The Explorer
2. The 45 Best Tech Sector Corporate Web Designs: H-O
3. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
4. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
5. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
6. The Next Multi-BILLION Dollar Idea
7. 2008 BMW M3 (E92) Production Pictures
8. 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe
9. Who is David Pitlyuk?
10. Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter

We’ll find out why #1 was #1, but note that it had over 15,000 unique visitors to that page. From the pages that didn’t get promotion anywhere, the majority of their traffic came from search engines. The ones with bigger search engine traffic was Hot Import nights 2007, 08′ BMW M3, the next multi-billion dollar idea, and 08′ Infiniti G37 coupe. It looks the car posts have brought a good amount of traffic, I just hope some of that is targeted enough to retain those random visitors.

Top Referrals

Here are the top referrals for websites (not search engines) that referred traffic to my blog:

1. CollegeHumor
2. StumbleUpon
3. Smashing Magazine
4. CSS Globe
5. TN Media
6. Digg
7. ActiveTuning
8. TheWolfWeb
9. TotalFark
10. John Chow dot Com

College Humor brought the majority of my traffic this month. When I found a took a picture of a funny Dora The Explorer toy, I made a post and submitted it to a few sites hoping to get it picked up. CollegeHumor was the only one that picked it up, but that ended up generating over 15,000 unique visitors (although not much of it retained I’m sure). StumbleUpon has brought a good amount of traffic to the Dora pages as well as some of web design stuff. From what I see, a lot of the SU visitors have similar interests as Digg visitors (obviously depending on the categories they choose). CSS Globe, TN Media, Digg, and the TheWolfWeb all linked to a post I made. John Chow visitors are still coming from various links that John had posted to my blog.

All said and done, it wasn’t a bad month! I’m having a good time blogging, and I’m meeting a lot of new people. I’m looking forward to seeing this continue to grow, and only time will tell where things lead.