With about eight hours remaining in 2008 (in my part of the world, anyway), I’d like to devote my 517th blog post of the year to you.
There are somewhere between 75 to 100 million blogs in the world and I’m grateful that you’ve taken the time to read mine along with the rest.
Thank you for reading.
I hope I was able to impart some advice, tips, and/or strategies to succeed in social media and online marketing.
I also add a special thanks to everyone who commented this year.
At a time when several hundred people subscribe to my blog by RSS reader or email, it takes a combination of inspiration and manual labor to click a link or two and add a comment.
I love comments! I love adding comments to other people’s blogs and I love seeing them on mine.
Thank you to the following people who added a comment in December:
Connie Bensen, Craig Kessler, Krishna Reddy, Rich Tucker, Kim Kobza, Steve Kayser, Mike Nichols, Brandon Cox, Micah Wittman, Corey Freeman, Stuart Foster, Matthew Mamet, Matthew Diehl, Jim Connolly, Andy Bailey, Sarah Dillon, Farhan Rehman, Josh Fialkoff, Kim Woodbridge, Rachel Levy, Susan Greene, Adriel Hampton, John Cass, Andrew Nystrom, Sylvia Martinez, Jaculynn Peterson, Helen Hoefele, Lee of ScamTypes, Andrew Charlton, Debbie James, David Tonen, Ricardo Bueno, Nick Lucido, Mike Seidle, Lord Matt, B. Durant, Danny Brown, Carl Morris, Jen Wilbur, Beth Kanter, Mark Juleen, Warren Sukernek, Harry Gold, Kimberlee Ferrell, Barb Chamberlain, Thomas Slatin, Ray Montero, Rich Sands, Vicki Brown, Max Gladwell, Anthony Farrior, David Meerman Scott, David Mullen, Sonny Gill, Monica Hamburg, Veronica Sopher, Gavin Heaton, Anita Bruzzese, Amber Naslund, Kimberly Bock, Jon Lansner, Dave Atkins, Karlos Schmieder, Emma Dozier, Tom Volkar, Gib Wallis, Melanie Hall, Jillian York, Debbie James, Deanna Keahey, Thao Ly, Apolinaras Sinkevicius, Christina Carlson, Adam Cohen, Joe Baz, Marc Meyer, LJ Jones, Marita Roebkes, Meghan Harvey, Todd Van Hoosear, Kami Huyse, Ryan Miller, Steve Evans, Jason Alba, Kristi Kikolani, Rajeev Edmonds,Shannon Whitley, Jay Radford, Stevie Wilson, Teresa Wu, David Bradley, Matt Pellerin, Susan Smith, Jim Lee, Mark Juleen, Alexandra Rampy, Charlene Engeron, Matt Hayden, Mark Evans, Gregory Kohs, David Gerard, Wendy Huffman, Geoff Girardin, Kathleen Couch, Amber Salmon, Andrea Baker, Greg Staker, George “Loki” Williams, Mark Dykeman, Jay Thompson, Kimmie Nguyen, Jim Benson, Jannie Funster, Duncan Alney, Andrew Krzmarzick, Richard Becker, Vardis Fisher, Chris Drinkut, Sean Colahan, Glen Turpin, Sherry Dedman, Heather Poirier, Gail Konop Baker, Rick Littrell, Jeffrey Levy, Mason Wong, Adam Snider, Rachel Kay, Judy Rey Wasserman, Heather Rast, Carlos Granier-Phelps, Heidi Cool, Heather McConnell, Mitch Joel, Shaun Dakin, Aram Zucker-Scharff, Sylwia Presley, Noelle Mena, Jim Winslow, John Haydon, Shelley Bernstein, Tim Laubacher, John Eckman, Shama Hyder, Victor Samra, Vicky Harres Akers, Mark Cahill, Julie Roads, Deneil Merritt, Nicole Simon, Harold Campbell, Stephanie Kieras, Jenn Castro, Rick Fisk, Scott Kaufman, Caleb Gardner, Sheila Langston, Ed Bennett, Ledo Fonseca, Yael Beeri, Adam Roades, Alka Shakya, Karen Carnes, and anyone else I may have missed!
You may have noticed that I recently set up a “Chat Catcher” script that displays a comment every time a blog post is referenced in a Twitter message. For this, special thanks to Shannon Whitley.
The new year will bring many additions to this blog, including a foray into corporate brand research and how companies are creatively using the internet, more additions to the recent series of best practices in social media, and video blogging. Stay tuned, keep reading, and if you choose, continue to comment.
Happy New Year!
Photo credit: jaredchapman
How One Post Quintupled My Blog Visitors
by Ari Herzog on January 5, 2009 · 6 comments
Responding to Loic Le Meur and his traffic sources for last month, I’d like to share with you this blog’s sources for the period of November 27, 2008 to January 4, 2009:
Seen in a vacuum, these numbers may not mean anything. But they do, especially when you consider I rarely receive significant visits from Facebook, let alone answers.yahoo.com.
If you scroll back to my five-week-old article of tips on how I use Google Analytics to track aggregate data of website visitors, referral sources, browsers and operating systems used, etc., you will note I included data from a three-month period:
Now look at the last four weeks:
Here’s a graph of that December traffic (using Quantcast, another tool I recently started using):
Do you want to guess what caused the mountain?
On December 21, I wrote an article about a series of Facebook phishing scams, that at the time, had zero online references. My post now has 69 comments, with new ones appearing every other day.
While you spend an average 60 seconds reading my blog content (typically because you read one post and rarely click into multiple posts), every visitor to the Facebook scam page spent three minutes reading!
Like the cycle of news, blog content comes and goes. But if you write something at the right time, visitors will come. You don’t have to be an A-list blogger; you can be anyone. Just write it and capture the noise. Provide possible solutions. Offer a way for people to ask questions, whether by blog comment, email, or Facebook message (and I received all three).
If you do it right, something will go viral as that Facebook post did.
Enough people told each other, that they came and posted their thanks. Those comments don’t belong to bloggers, either. There are few blog links attached to their names. Most of their comments are attached to random email addresses on yahoo and hotmail. The bulk of those commenters were Facebook users–but if I have anything to say about it, they will become future bloggers.
Photo credit: _federico_
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