Growth of a Blog (Reflection)

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David Hopkins, AwardEvery now and then I look into the stats for my blog and think “blimey, how many!?!”. Since I started my ramblings back in October 2008 I’ve grown to nearly 160,000 hits and over 5,000 unique visitors a month.

How did this happen?

I started blogging in October 2008 with a single post. I read a few articles online about how to ‘advertise’ my blog, and started Googling different eLearning blogs and making comments on the various posts I found interesting. It was fun and traffic to my own blog was steadily creeping up.

That was all well and good, but it wasn’t until two very important things happened that my blog really took off;

  • Tony Karrer at eLearning Learning: Tony listed my blog on his eLearning Learning portal, and the number of hits shot up (roughly the middle of February 2009).
  • Twitter: Although I joined Twitter in January 2009 (as hopkinsdavid), it wasn’t until March that I installed the WordPress Plugin that sends my blog posts to Twitter. Since then I have jumped to over 670 followers.

Here are some graphs (made in Excel, but the figures came from the installation of Awstats I have on the server)

stats-unique-visitors
Webstats: Unique Visitors (November 2008 – June 2009)

  • November 2008: 26 unique, individual visitors to the blog
  • June 2009: 5,281 unique, individual visitors to the blog

stats-number-visitorsWebstats: Number of page Page Impressions (November 2008 – June 2009)

  • November 2008: 35
  • June 2009: 12,077

stats-number-hitsWebstats: Number of Hits to the website (November 2008 – June 2009)

  • November 2008: 2100 hits (pages + images)
  • June 2009: 159,471 hits (pages + images)

I can also see, on a daily basis (if I look into  that much detail) the affect any particular blog post or piece of Twitter activity has. The fact that some of my posts have been re-tweeted so many times;

The days when I posted these, and other ‘sucessful’ blog entries I can see the traffic rose quite dramatically. What can I take from this? Well, you guys like to read/watch presentations.

What I can also see, that is not easy to represent graphically, is that the top referring pages (you click a link on the referring page to be directed here) are nearly all Twitter related, and that some 8,000 visits a month are direct from the RSS feed!

So, what next. Well, I don’t really have a plan other than to continue blogging about my work and the little things I find interesting about eLearning. The practical applications, and implications, of eLearning is continually changing so there will always be something new to write about … see you soon!