My 2nd report on my 6 months goal of 5000 visitors per day

Today is 19 so it is again one of those days when I publish here the stats for the previous month, what I did and what I intend to do in the next month.

This month I can tell you it was full of surprises and things to learn. I am not a big blogger, even if I work in this business, I am an IT person, but as much as I love the domain, blogging was not quite a hobby for me so far and I discover a lot of things while blogging here. I can tell you that blogging is a special kind of “art”, not like a regular site, where you would offer a particular service. In blogging you need to have that “special something” to catch public attention day by day. Blogging, is based on social awareness, I think that the main source of traffic for blogs is direct traffic. When direct traffic becomes your main source of traffic, I think you can call yourself a successful blogger. I learn this day by day and I still have a long way to reach that point. So, coming back to my stats…

This month was kind of a crazy one for me. One of my articles, funny top 10 rules for a power metal band was stumbled hard and I suddenly received 1525 visits in one single day! This was until that moment the highest peak for this blog. I was a bit curious why this happened since this article was on Digg and did quite nothing and was on SU since 1 month and again, did almost nothing. Well, it generated about 400 page views when it was submitted and then I thought it was over.

Boy, I was wrong! Suddenly, it received 1525 visits over night! I was thrilled! But wait! The second day I received 3587 visits for the same article! I couldn’t believe my eyes! And then 2429 in the next day! The traffic went a bit down after the first days, but still went on for 10 days with a media of 1200-1300 hits per day for this article! I was just thrilled seeing my stats like this for more than 10 days!

And I did receive guests! Was I a good host?

The best thing you could do after such a spike is to publish good articles that keep your visitors interested. I was just lucky that Dr J (http://jinright.edublogs.org) sent me a great article to publish here in our guest blog collaboration, Ten most valuable teaching secrets of a Ph.D. in music education, that was written out of his experience as a music teacher and revealed some great tips on how to improve your playing and music understanding in general.

The article received the highest number of votes, so far, 10, and all 10 were 5 stars, and 7 coments, so I say we had an article of great quality! The article of Dr J reached SU and hit 200 page views in one day and a week later 587 page views. What can you ask more? I know: an other article from Dr J

The second guest blogger was Jack Pribek from pribek.net (check Jack Pribek’s album Trouble ain’t over, on CDBaby) who put up an article that soon became one of the most commented articles on this blog. Considering the fact that it was posted last of the most commented articles, I consider it a real success. The article of Jack didn’t yet reach the peak on SU. It reached about 185 page views but considering my previous experience with SU I expect it to jump any moment now.

Both, Dr J and Jack proved to be great persons to chat with, musicians that have a pleasure for sharing information and tips and I really enjoyed this experience of hosting their articles. The only thing I regret in this is the fact that I haven’t found the time to write 2 articles to send them for their blogs! But I promise I will do my best to find the time even if lately I have been very busy!

From an other point of view, I can tell that SU users have a the lowest bounce rate and that they don’t convert well to RSS. I have 98 RSS subscribers at the moment even if the traffic jumped a lot due to SU, so that makes me think that actually what converted my RSS subscribers is the search engine traffic which grew somehow proportional with my RSS subscribers. Or the RSS subscribers grew with search traffic, whatever…

What I didn’t manage to do this month

As I was saying, I didn’t manage(yet) to write those articles I wanted to write for Dr J’s and Jack’s blogs.

I didn’t start that YouTube channel that I said I will. I didn’t find enough time to allocate to this blog so I felt I was somehow less proactive and I don’t like that, because I consider that being proactive is the best thing you can do for your blog.

What I want to do next month

Do what I missed last month, then I intend to develop this site as being more than a blog. I want to add various resources on it, since I see that a lot of guys starting to play the guitar look for such lessons, guitar tabs, tips, etc. I am not yet convinced about the form but I do have the idea.

Focus more on search engine optimization and on search engine marketing.

And now the stats:

At the end of this month, I had

• 20600 visits (5,707 visits last month)
• 33293 page views (9,444 page views last month)
• 1 SU spike the highest of 3587 visits in one day (4 SU spikes, the highest of 519 visitors in one day last month)
• 98 RSS subscribers (64 RSS subscribers and growing)
• 9.49% direct traffic, 13.05% search engines and 77.46% referring sites (9.9% direct traffic, 31.03% search engine traffic and 59.07% social referring sites last month)
• 22786 page views for one single article!

The stats are looking good. However, this is a temporary growth, I need more than this, but I consider I am on the right track! Let’s see what I will do this month! By the way, I plan also to add some statistic information on RSS only, so subscribe to RSS to not miss anything!

Also read the first report here!

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