One of my goals for this year was to improve the posts that I was writing in order to provide more useful content for folks visiting the site. The easiest measure of this is to look at the total number of visits to the site 1. A few months back I posted in some detail about the stats on the site so far this year. With two thirds of the year completed, I wanted to provide an update as to how the site is doing.
Last year, I averaged about 35 hits/day and had a grand total of 5,004 hits on the blog. My goal was to triple that by the end of 2011. As you will see, I have rather exceeded my expectations.
My data comes from two sources:
- The native WordPress Stats application that comes as part of the WordPress JetPack.
- Feedburner stats 2.
Below is a table listing the totals for the first 8 months of the year, broken down by direct hits and Feedburner hits.
| Month | Direct | Feedburner | Total |
| January | 2,664 | – | 2,664 |
| February | 2,741 | 547 | 3,288 |
| March | 3,217 | 6,710 | 9,927 |
| April | 3,274 | 9,340 | 12,614 |
| May | 4,712 | 5,572 | 10,284 |
| June | 6,081 | 9,123 | 15,204 |
| July | 7,323 | 21,830 | 29,153 |
| August | 7,702 | 15,295 | 22,997 |
| Total | 37,714 | 68,417 | 106,131 |
As you can see, from direct hits alone, I am doing far better than I imagined. My average daily hits in August was 248, not counting what comes through Feedburner. For the entire 8 months, the average daily hits is about 160/day, well above what I was aiming for. When you add Feedburner into the mix, things really shoot up. Indeed, I have passed 100,000 hits in just the first 8 months of the year, which astounds me.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in all of this is not to stress the day-to-day numbers. For the first several months, I was obsessed with checking my stats (the truth is, I still check them several times a day) and I was concerned every time I saw a slow day. I no longer worry about that. What I focus on is attempting to raise the number of hits from month to month and as far as direct hits to the blog goes, I’ve done that for each of the first 8 months of the year.
Of course, I just write the posts. A lot of the success that I have had this year is thanks to the folks that have come to the site and liked what they saw enough to tell others about it. I also have places like SF Signal to thanks for signal-boosting some of my posts, giving them more visibility than they might otherwise have received. Thanks to everyone who has visited the site! I hope to keep providing more good content and maybe see these numbers go up a bit more before the end of the year.
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