It’s time for a New Years tradition on my blog, the annual traffic review. If you’re really interested you can go read the 2008 most popular posts post and the 2009 blog traffic review.
Really, these are numbers that don’t mean a hill of beans, but I get a lot of SEO and blogging questions, so here’s the growth of my own site, now essentially done it’s third year. Remember, raw traffic doesn’t drive your business, and I’ve never made more than a few hundred dollars via my website (and that’s been through a bit of affiliate advertising and a little adsense for feeds). So you can forget your dreams of making a living via your website. Real estate investing will make us both more money than that.
What this blog has done is given me a pretty solid platform to share some of my better work, meet some great people and enhance my standing within the real estate investment and Realtor communities.
First off, I’ve seen nice consistent growth in visitor numbers, and as I’ve adjusted the style of my writing a bit of a fall off in the number of visits per visitor. I’m still happy with the growth year over year though.
At 18,005 visits this year, that’s almost 50 visits a day, which is pretty decent for a blog I don’t update nearly often enough. The core of good SEO is good content, which has given me a pretty consistent organic feed around 45-50%.
You can see from the graph that there was a big spike in November, which was the result of pissing off Mr. Turner.
As far as other usage stats go, things are pretty stable. Pages per visit and average time on site are down a little year over year, but I’m still not complaining.
When we look at all traffic sources, Google organic traffic makes up the largest segment, with Garth Turner’s site as the most prolific referring site. It’s also nice to see organic traffic from Yahoo, Google.ca and Bing, as well as from FeedBurner (my RSS and Email subscribers).
The most popular pages (beyond the home page and about page) were not surprising, except for the avg time on page for Bubble Blogging = Masturbation, which was due to the extensive debate in the comments.
(Links: Prices since 1962, Bubble Blogging, Alberta in 2010, Problem Tenants in Ontario, 2010 Housing Market Price Predictions, Winter 2010 Rental Site Rankings, Real Estate Investment Training)
There’s also been a lot of great sites that have linked to mine (and at least a few completely useless ones). Honorable mention goes out to Alberta Real Estate Watch, myREINspace, Sara and Sheldon’s Edmonton Real Estate Blog, Landlord Legal, First Rental Property and the Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive.
The majority of the traffic I get comes from Canada, but there’s 88 other countries or territories from whence I’ve had visitors.
That’s 87.5% Canadian traffic, and that ain’t bad.
The map of traffic (size roughly equals traffic) from across Canada is entertaining to me. Most of it is Edmonton/Calgary, Vancouver and Southern Ontario.
One number that I think is really important is the number of subscribers, which I’ve managed to keep fairly constant even during the upheaval of the past year. I’m glad you guys stick with me!
Curious what that spike in the blue line was? It’s clicks through to the first Edmonton Rental Market Report.
I challenge the rest of the bloggers out there to be a little more public with the stats of their own sites. A little consistent work writing can lead to some pretty decent traffic.
Growth means improvement. People now checks for blogs because in blogs you have the freedom to express the truth so if there are faults on the estate they want they can check it out on blogs. Not only faults but also praises.