Traffic

I mentioned last month that I would change my posting schedule to something less frequent, and I knew this would have an impact on traffic and RSS subscribers for the blog. The stats this month definitely show this as a fact. This month I brought in 6,342 unique visitors and 8,528 pageviews, about a 25% drop from the previous month. I know what I need do to increase these numbers drastically, but in reality I’m not too concerned about it. This is a personal blog, and I consider a personal journal that I can look back on for myself. I do like to provide content and information that can help other entrepreneurs, and I will continue to write what I can when I can. I have a lot of pending stuff that I want to write which I think will be pretty successful and interesting to all of you, so be on the lookout!

Looking at the charts, we can see one spike for the day that I wrote my article on improving Google Analytics. The article made its rounds and brought in a decent amount of traffic.

Monetization

Last month I mentioned that I had something unique and unexpected that brought in some revenue for the blog. I had a request for a company that wanted to purchase the rights to an image in order to use it as a backdrop for a trade show booth. I totally did not expect anything like that, and I ended up selling the rights for $300. It may have been the easiest $300 I’ve ever made. On top of that, I did my first private ad sale (and you’ll see more of that in November), for a big increase in revenue:

Text Link Ads: $2.72
Kontera: $4.70
AdSense: $7.65
Private Ad Sales: $25
Image Licensing: $300

Total: $340.07

Since October, I’ve actually pulled Kontera off the site again. I just don’t feel like it’s the right timing to have it running for right now. I obviously don’t expect to pull numbers like this again for November because I don’t think image licensing will be very common, but I did just get a not too shabby private ad sale.

If you’ve looked over time, you may have noticed that AdSense revenue has dropped significantly. I think this is partly due to the timing, but also because a big percentage of my traffic has been coming from Google Images, and I don’t expect much of that to convert into ad clicks. If I want to really increase AdSense revenue (and traffic while I’m at it), it will take writing some very good content that can get circulated around the web, to bring in some good relevant traffic.

RSS Subscribers

Last month I hit a peak number of subscribers, but I also mentioned that I thought my numbers would come down because of my new posting schedule. This seems to be the case, but I hope it’s pretty much leveled off now. It seems to average between 90-100 subscribers, which isn’t too shabby in my opinion.

Search Engine Goodness

Last month my search engine traffic took a huge hit and decreased by 19%. This month was even worse, with a 23% drop to 1,745 unique visitors. This was mostly due to Google, with a 25% drop in traffic from them alone.

Lets take a look and see which keywords were used most to find my blog last month:

1. blog title ideas
2. e92 m3
3. best corporate websites
4. www.davidpitlyck.com
5. virginia mansions
6. best blog designs
7. mansions in virginia
8. atlantic city pitlyuk
9. chima tysons corner
10. chima tysons

Nothing too exciting going on in this list.

Popular Pages/Content

Here was the most popular content in September:

1. April (Month)
2. How Google Analytics Can Be Dramatically Improved
3. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
4. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
5. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
6. New Virginia Civil Fee For Traffic Tickets Is Nuts
7. Off Topic (Category)
8. A Raunchy Dora The Explorer
9. An Electric Yamaha R1 Motorcycle
10. Tech Sector Corporate Web Designs: Best Of The Best

A few new comers to the list from the archived posts list. It’s interesting which ones randomly increase in traffic again out of nowhere.

Top Referrals

Here’s a list of the top referrals that do not include search engines:

1. StumbleUpon
2. Smashing Magazine
3. Nevblog
4. Digg
5. Facebook
6. Naver
7. Ducati-Riders.de
8. Sphinn (Thanks Derek!)
   
9. CSS Globe
10. Bildirgec.org