Bloggers Journal

Albeit a little late, this is the report for the third month of “being online”.  It’s been a pretty hectic month – both online and offline.  Offline I’ve been finishing up my PhD – it’s finally submitted – hence the delay in this post.  Online, there are a number of things that have changed.  First of, you will realise that the domain has changed.  No longer is my blog going by the domain, markbell.me.uk, but is now being branded as BloggersJournal.com.  I’ve also switched theme to try and improve the look of the site.  It’s not great – but stick by it…

Alexa Rank

I usually post a bit of information on my Alexa rank.  However, it is a measure of success that I’m not going to be sticking by too closely.  My aim, long term is to drop to below 100k.  I think that’s any serious blogger/webmasters’ aim.  Switching to BloggersJournal.com has meant that my Alexa rank was crap – a few million at least.  However, it has dropped dramatically to now be sitting around 500k.

Comments

I’ve been quite surprised that my posts, which are now really infrequent, are actually generating more user interaction.  I think it’s great because there is more engagement between readers.  I haven’t any exact stats on it for the period of the month.  However, for the overlap into month 4, there have been 469 comments approved.  From last month that is about 200 comments this month.  Of course around half of them are my responses, but still 100 comments from individual readers is climbing in the right direction.

In terms of spam, this month it went absolutely crazy.  I guess I’ve been commenting on a few do-follow blogs and this is the result.  Ironically, the most spam came through my post on spam being a measure of success!

The top commented posts this month, including previous months were,

• Is spam a measure of success?
• Before you start, plan plan plan some more
• What can an NHL pre-season fixture teach bloggers
• Boost Traffic – How I increased by reach by 4700%
• The Alexa Rank – What’s the big deal?

Analytics

Here are the stats from Google Analytics!

• 693 visits
• 428 Unique visitors
• 2,007 page views
• 2.90 average page views
• 4m 11s average page time
• 52.67% bounce rate
• 58.87% new visitors

My visitors have fluctuated a bit.  However, around 16th August, I started a networking group on Skype.  I’ve also been doing a lot more marketing on Twitter (using Twitter Dummy) and on StumbleUpon to boost my advertising.  My visitors are mainly from,

• United Kingdom
• USA
• Australia
• India
• Canada

The most popular traffic sources are,

• direct traffic – 24%
• twitter – 10%
• blog engage – 8%
• markbell.me.uk – 6%
• stumbleupon – 6%

Advertising

Recently I’ve been undertaking reviews of two products,

• Twitter Dummy
• SEO Revenge

These products will soon feature in my reviews section of the website, as well as affiliate links in the side bar.

From Google AdSense I’ve started to earn some revenue due to the increase in unique traffic.

What else has been happening?

I’ve also been toying with the idea of setting up a niche website on something I know a bit about.  This I have started, and have written a post about.  Be sure to check out the series which follows.