Total BS (Blog Statistics)

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of my blog--thirty days, that is. As a late-adopter blogger, I've been wondering how my blog is doing. I've asked a few people and gotten some answers, but I couldn't find many hard statistics.

I'm guessing that many other bloggers may have similar questions, so here is a dump of my blog statistics. To be sure, this is just one data point, and I haven't exactly adhered to good research methodology...but for what it's worth:

1. There have been 42 posts, 922 comments, and 304 trackbacks.
2. According to StatCounter, the site had 268,060 unique visitors. This reflects 211,947 first-time visitors and 56,113 repeat visitors. (A first-time visitor is defined as a person without a cookie for the site. A return visitor is defined as a person returning to the site an hour or more after visiting it.)
3. According to Technorati, 1,479 sites now maintain 2,843 links to the blog. About two weeks ago, my blog ranked #488 in Technorati; the current rank is #289.
4. According to Feedburner, 4,231 people get my blog via feeds. Sorry, about my repeated editing, guys!
5. According to Feedblitz, 428 people get my blog through email.
6. Traffic to my web site, www.guykawasaki.com, increased from about 400 page views/day to 800-1,200 page views/day.
7. My Amazon sales rank for The Art of the Start (go ahead, I dare you to click on this link) hovered between #1,500 and #2,000 prior to the start of my blog. Currently, the sales rank hovers between #500 and #750.
8. I use SnipURL to track how many people click on links. This has yielded lots of interesting information:

• The links in the right column called “Alignment of Interest” (as opposed to “conflict of interest”--get it?) generated between 900-1,000 click throughs (each) to the home pages of BitPass, FilmLoop, Kaboodle, PhoneBites, and SimplyHired.
• I tested the power of a blog posting versus a listserver announcement when FilmLoop released its Macintosh version. My listserver has about 8,000 subscribers. The blog posting generated 1,846 click throughs. The listserver generated 605 click throughs.
• I tried a section in the right column to list a “loop du jour.” 113 people clicked through in the first two days. Then I switched to plugging loops in postings. 1,925 people clicked through to see the loop about China. 3,164 people clicked through to the loop of pictures of the readers of my blog. 1,597 people clicked through to see the loop of only the award winners. 1,469 people clicked through to see the Tony Hawk wedding loop (this posting is very recent).
• 7,140 people clicked through on the blog entry about the charts of Karl Hartig. Incidentally, he told me that his weekly visitor count increased from 231 visits/week to 38,946 visits/week.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know what all these stats mean, but I hope they will help you gauge how your blog is doing. All in all, I've had a blast, so thank you for reading my blog--and linking to it too.

Written at: Atherton, California

Comments

[Brian Bush]

Item #2 certainly plays silly buggers with the definition of "unique."

[All In A Box]

What a great stats!

Could you explain how you got soo much traffics in a short period of time?

[tuf]

Check the license, I think it is forbidden to give this kind of information about your earns with adsens. warning you could give banned.

[Oliver Thylmann]

Great post, thank you. I fully agree that using AdSense is not a business model. With that off my chest, you can improve your revenues.

Put a rectangle below your posts. People like to read your posts and when they are done they are much more likely to read on and take action. So that is the perfect spot in articles. End of the article.

And dependent on your content, the amount of money you can make with AdSense can be performing a lot better. I put my summaries of the MBA at the OUBS online and the click throughs are amazing and the prices people pay for something like "Porter's 5 forces model" is amazing :)

[Faisal Khan]

Congratulations on your 30 days! Hope you will be here for quite some time. I throughly enjoy reading your blog. Not ot mention, a lot many stat programs will not tell you of those readers behind a proxy, where only a single cookie is allowed.

FK

[Mike Johnston]

The Google AdSense model is still a good one; however your ability to generate revenue actually deminishes because of two things.

One: The placement of your ads are most likely the reason your calcs come to $.001 per visit. If you place ads above, below or in a sidebar of each of your posts, I bet you'll see an increase- placement is everything. (See http://www.tuaw.com)

Two: People visit your blog to see what "you" have to "say". This is good in the sense that when you say "visit something" it has much more credibility and trust. Most people know what Google ads are these days-- if the ads where much more relevant in terms of your "content" then it would be better for everyone. The end result is that with a blog, your content simply "changes to often" for adsense to keep up. That IS NOT a bad thing for us fans Guy!

Keep Kicking Butt!

[Raza]

Guy,

You have 900 subscribers through Bloglines (www.bloglines.com).

I can see that since i read your blog through that.

You are doing awesome. Keep going !!!

[John Scott]

That's some very, very impressive traffic for a blog. That's better traffic than any blog I know of, and most websites.

[TW]

Salute to you master! You earn another 10$ for making a story out of almost nothing! :-)