I’ve never had the pleasure of counting myself among the Alexa elite (as a matter of fact, this blog holds a humble 8763rd place – among sites Norwegians visit). Never paid much attention to search engine optimisation, commenting wildly on other bloggers’ posts for requital traffic, unless I should, for other reasons, but I do appreciate frequent visitors and love the input you provide, unless you’re up to no good, that is.
In short, my insignificances are indeed highly insignificant, in the big picture that is the blogosphere, but I cherish my readers, who, more often than not, provide additional facts to my posts – or correct them, even, which is even better. There’s no better way to expand your horizon than to have your own misconceptions rectified, no matter how embarrassing at the time. Which is why I’m pleased to pride myself with a highly competent parish, whose own blogs I admire immensely.
Even though my traffic figures have been and remain modest, I’ve discovered that there’s really nothing to boost traffic, if that’s what you’re after – provided you have the time, unfortunately a very sparse commodity, to actually maintain the blog regularly.
Seeing as I prefer quality over quantity, I broke my stride the other week somehow, on deciding to experiment with a somewhat more popular – some would say common – approach, delving into the realms of popular culture. Which, believe you me, is a lot easier in Norwegian, as we Norwegians do not much care for high brow phenomena, save for the odd occasion when, for one reason or the other, we’re flaunting our faux intellectualism. In reality we’re every bit as commercially inclined as the outrageous Americans. The decision was made: I was determined to attract the salt of the earth by blogging a few posts of monumental interest to the average news reader (useful information: Hereabouts the term “news” refers to entertainment, celebrities and the “heinous Muslim immigrants”).
My blog boasts a meagre average of some 500 visits a day (not unique), but on 20 April I published a post on the Pirate Bay verdict (in Norwegian), which was all over the place, linking liberally to every Twingly-enabled news outlet, thereby securing a minor boost in reciprocal traffic, to 2252 visits and 10,475 page views that day, an exercise I repeated on several occasions, in relation to other popular subjects, such as Norway’s Eurovision Song Contest contender, who accidentally won the whole thing (did I remember to inform you that Norwegian news are all entertainment, celebrities et cetera?).
As you will see from this table, activity was extremely low during the year’s two initial months, until a gradual increase became evident as of March:
The May figures aren’t complete at the moment, but with all probability end at approximately 10,000 unique visitors. Still not impressive, but I’m more than happy. A monthly average from just below 1000 unique monthly visitors to say 11,000, wouldn’t be possible for a fairly new blog, such as this (launched in the end of last September, with moderate activity), if it hadn’t been for the Twingly trackbacks and Google Friend Connect. Here’s an interesting piece of information, see:
Of the above shown figures, some 48,5 percent are referred from my very limited participation in the Google Friend Connect network – among those actually referred from elsewhere, that is. I’ve joined a very moderate number of blogs, as follower, if you will. All blogs that I intend to follow, mind you (joining those you don’t care much to follow, simply in order to attract reciprocal traffic, would be a little overzealous, in my opinion).
In other words, if increasing traffic figures is a goal in itself, I really ought to join more sites – via Google Friend Connect. As the screendump to the left (or the real deal in the lower end of my sidebar) shows, I haven’t got more than 13 followers to show for myself, me included. Followers who undoubtedly have come to much of the same conclusion; that Google Friend Connect indeed is a proverbial lifesaver, in terms of traffic figures.
In fact, I’m amazed that very few blogs seem to have discovered. If you don’t have one, Go get. If you’d like to assist fellow bloggers in their attempts at improving visits, that is. If you’re all about attracting traffic to yourself: joining blogs who have it is an alternative, I suppose.
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I’m not sure what to think of GFC yet, but I’m adding about 5 members per day. I’m wondering if there will be some kind of network effect once I reach a magic number of users.
The only drawback, as far as I can tell, is the extra load time. Other than that, seems like “members” give a website a little more authority. Also, I believe GFC is in beta, which tells me Google plans to improve it further.