Dumb Little Blogger monthly traffic report – May 2010

Welcome to Dumb Little Blogger’s 3rd monthly traffic post, I couldn’t wait to do this post because from the past 2 months I’ve received great response from our readers for such posts. I was really hoping that there would be huge spikes in traffic in this month, but somethings didn’t go as I had thought. Even after facing many problems I managed to avoid a drop in traffic and I’m looking forward for big rises in the month of June. For those of you who have missed my previous traffic report, do check it out to get an idea on our audience and its growth.

The reason why I post such reports is for you to get an idea of my promotional methods and traffic strategies. I posted the first one on my friend’s request, but it was pretty surprising to see that a lot more people were benefiting from this, so I decided to this each month. I recommend that this post must be for only informing yourself about the latest promotional methods I use, because this varies for each blog depending on its content, niche, authors and investment.

Monthly traffic

The overall traffic for the month of May stood at 14,596 visits which is just 6% to 7% more than the previous month. I was a bit disappointed with this as it wasn’t worth the effort I had put in all because of a few problems related to server and design. But still I’m happy that my traffic didn’t decline.

Other stats too have been disappointing, bounce rate stood at 49.80% which is 14% increase compared to last month and pages per visit has stayed at the same levels which is 2.18.

Top traffic sources

My top sources for traffic remained the same that is blog commenting and forum posting, if can notice above you’ll see that most of my traffic comes from blogs such as Techcrunch, Mashable and Problogger on which I usually comment on and I also get a few visitors from forums such as Digital Point and Warrior Forums, traffic from forums did reduce a bit as I was banned from DP once for spamming.

One more thing which is new on the list is StumbleUpon with which I usually didn’t have much luck, this month it made it on the list because I set up a visible button and got a few friends to vote on my posts. I successfully built a network on StumbleUpon and sent mails to all as soon as I published a new post.

The direct traffic also includes a few visitors from Twitter, but my analytics couldn’t pick it up because most of the Twitter users use third party clients. I have started to get huge number of retweets for each post many are from retweet.it whereas some come from friends with whom I exchange retweets.

Building a community of loyal readers

During May I was successful with one thing that is I successfully built a community of loyal readers. All of you may have seen that my posts have had a significant increase in comments compared to before and this has nothing to do with traffic. I managed to do this by building a network of friends on Facebook who are bloggers of either my own niche or other niches, and then I started to actively comment on their posts and started to exchange retweets and diggs with them, this really helped me as in a few days one link on Facebook would give me upto 20 comments on Facebook itself and around 13 to 20 people would have visited my site.

This friendship became really strong during may and all of my post started to get a hell lot of retweets, diggs and shares on Facebook. Such networks really help in triggering a viral chain for your blog, till now it hasn’t been much of a viral chain, but I’m sure that I will be able to once I further build my network.

Making blogger friends online isn’t as tough as I thought, I first started to off writing comments on small blogs and then started searching for friends on Facebook and actively participated in their groups. All this surely helped in getting more friends and with of this I also built my Facebook friends to an higher level.

Top searches

Search engine traffic remained constant and I kept getting 40 to 50 visitors each day and I’m eagerly waiting for the next PR update to get PR 3 or 4 which doesn’t seem really tough to achieve. One reason why my search traffic doesn’t convert well is because most of the keywords which I rank well for aren’t directly related to my blog.

From the beginning I’ve never concentrated much on my blogs SEO, the only thing I did and what got me the maximum results was blog commenting, but from this month I will be doing a detailed keyword analysis with some tweaks in my theme.

Goals for next month

Though their were many road blocks for this month I managed to achieve all my goals except reaching 20,000. The previous month had been of great expectations, I had no school and could spend the entire day in front of my computer and moreover I had a hell lot of cash to invest, but things didn’t go on the way I had planned, but I successfully weathered all of the road blocks and have a pretty clear road map for this month.

• Publish 4 guest posts on other medium sized blogs in my niche.
• Spend upto $75 on advertising with the help of a few coupons.
• Write upto 20 articles atleast, which are mainly guides.
• Start allowing guest posts for readers cautiously by maintaining quality.
• Comment on more blogs rather than just TechCrunch and Mashable.
• Get an average of 20 comments per post including the author.
• Start SEO planning for my blog and meet my goals in next PR update.

On to our readers

My blog has had good growth from the past 5 months, I’m really hoping that I could continue this, anyhow this traffic stat post was just for the demand of my readers and is to show you how I’ve been growing my traffic. I hope all of you are satisfied with this and your free to express your thoughts and ask me any sort of questions either in the comments below or using the contact form.

To keep up with future posts please do subscribe to our feeds and follow me on Twitter.

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