Around this time last year, I summarized the stats from the first year of this blog. At that time, I had written about 500 posts and was getting about 400 ‘hits’ a day, averaging around 8000 hits each month.
It’s a bit of a different story today, two years on from when I started. For example:
- Total number of posts written (from Dec 2007 to Dec 31 2009): 866
- Average views per month: Has increased from around 9000 in January 2009 to around 24,000 per month in December 2009. The reason for this exponential increase? One of my posts got picked up and promoted via StumbleUpon and it continues to be the most viewed of all my blog posts, with most of its traffic coming from StumbleUpon. That post went viral!
- When do they come?: The pattern of views hasn’t changed from last year — most views are still on business days, with obvious drops on weekends.
The top 10 posts and the long tail
Chris Anderson wrote about the Long Tail and my blog stats show that my posts definitely follow the Long Tail pattern — some 20 or so are very popular, but then there’s a really big drop off for the remaining 800 or so. However, most have had 30+ views, so they ‘earn their keep’.
The ten blog posts below have been the most popular, based on number of views. In fact, they account for ~90,000 (about one-third) of the ~260,000 total number of views this blog has had in the two years since I started it (stats as at Dec 31, 2009):
- A picture is worth a thousand words (19,343)
- Inches to pixels converter (16,936)
- Lost your Windows XP taskbar and desktop (10,138)
- Word 2003: Create an automatic Table of Contents (8,067)
- Word 2007: Outline numbering (7,673)
- Word: Automated tables of figures (6,758)
- Word: Update fields in headers and footers (6,149)
- Restoring an SQL Express database on another computer (5,940)
- Acrobat 9: Installation issues (4,860)
- Outlook: Creating a hyperlink to a network file (4,741)
Except for the first one, all the top ten posts are related to troubleshooting and helping people do a task. Which is what my job as a technical communicator is all about!
Searches
So, what were the people who found my blog searching for? Here are the top ten search terms, from my blog’s WordPress statistics:
Where do they come from?
No surprises here — StumbleUpon was the biggest source of my blog’s visitors:
Comments
I implemented a new ‘feature’ this year — if a troubleshooting or task-based post of mine helped you, I asked that you buy me a coffee as ‘thanks’. So far, only a few people have said ‘thanks’ that way… Interestingly, despite the statistics, number of views, and obvious value that some posts have, I get very few comments. But those I do get are either asking for further help, or are effusive in their thanks, such as these:
To all my readers, thanks for stopping by. I hope you’ve learned something. And I wish you all the best for 2010 and beyond.
[Links last checked December 2009]