WordPress.com seems to be a lot more into the marketing and publicity side of things these days. Earlier in January I was sent a flashy report article on my blog stats and visitors for the past year (2011). I thought I’d share a few of them, mainly for amusement, but also in case anyone else is interested what WordPress monitors on your behalf.
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Yeah, so that still doesn’t impress me too much. I suppose the analogy works if you presume most people turn up for the opera and leave after a mere 30 seconds or 1 minute.
In 2011, there were 6 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 62 posts.
Okay, I admit it; this was a really poor year in terms of output. I blame that nasty thing called a degree (followed by the even nastier demands of a job). At least you can rest assured that care and effort goes into every post!
The top referring sites in 2011 were:
I think this just proves the best way of getting blog visitors is to spam Reddit. Or link to yourself on Wikipedia. Shameless I know, but it requires minimal effort on my half at least, and maximum benefit for everyone.
Most visitors came from The United States. The United Kingdom & Germany were not far behind.
Right; English speaking (either natively or to a high level) and technologically advanced nations. Big surprise there. Other notables seem to include: Russia, Sweden, India, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, Australia.
Quite amusingly, my most popular post of the whole year was posted was only posted several of days from the end, while I was on holidays. That’s inspiration for you.
So in conclusion, it would seem what these wonderfully informative stats are telling me is a) visitors are almost totally due to viral marketing and much less to content, b) I don’t really care about the popularity contest, c) nothing I really didn’t know already.
Until 2013, folks. Or not, if the Mayans turn out to be right.