It’s almost a month since I started my blog out of a spur, and I sit here to re-evaluate how far I’ve come.

I won’t even bother talking about the revenue yet - it’s not at that stage yet, and I am quite frankly not that concerned about it yet. My initial goal is the traffic, and also optimizing my blog with the right plugins and SEO optimizations, as well as expanding on categories.

First of all I will review all the plugins I’ve installed so far, in chronological order (to the best of my memory) :

• Feedburner Feed Replacement - A great way to display the # of feeds to your blog on the sidebar, as well as track the progress of it. My record high for subscriptions at one point was 33. My record low was 7 (excluding the first day).
  
• Google Sitemaps - A great plugin to easily create sitemaps of your site. Google picks these up and indexes your site better! Google Webmaster tools can help you do this. You register your sitemap through the Webmaster Tools after you create the XML sitemap file with this plugin.
  
• Optimal Title - A great way to show the title of each post better in your &lttitle> tag. Great for SEO.
  
• WP Category Posts - This provides an easy way for people to browse your posts by category. Also, by having these links in the site, it increases the search engine crawls and gives more exposure.
  
• Sidebar Widgets - This gives you a much better, and easy-to-manage sidebar scheme!
• digg Integrator - So I can get hits from Digg. Digg has given me a LOT of traffic.
  
• Brian’s Threaded Comments - Threaded comments gives another dimension to your comment scheme. Previous to this plugin, comments were very linear. But with this, you can create a scheme where you can directly reply to a comment, andit would be nested within, and it goes in steps! It creates more of a forum-like atmosphere, encouraging more comments. It also looks neater.
  
• Related Posts - This plugin will display a list of links to related posts within your blog on your blog entries. This encourages people to read more posts as they visit your site. More pageviews, more exposure.
  
• Adsense-Deluxe - This plugin makes inserting Google Adsense advertisements in your blog a breeze!
• del.icio.us widget - I have yet to see the benefits of this, but then I haven’t been involved in that network as heavily as I’d like to. I only have so much time… It’s hard to cover all aspects of traffic generating but I will do my best. Still, I believe in spending more time on writing good posts than anything else.
  
• Subscribe To Comments - This plugin allows people to subscribe to comments via email notification if new comments are left. This is great when there is a good discussion going on in a post of yours, and people want to come back. It increases repeat visits and pageviews.
  
• MyAvatars - This plugin shows your MyBloglog.com avatars on the comments. It gives the comments a face to go by, and it makes it easier to perceive the flow of the conversation, and it looks nice!

Now, Let’s talk about Traffic.

So in February I’m seeing a much higher # of visits compared to January. It has been a steady climb. January 9th was the day my blog launched. So technically, the 10th was the first full day of measuring. 111 was the # of visits that day. The lowest I’ve had ever was 109 and that was about 10 days into the blog. The highest I’ve ever had was 420 visits in a day on the 17th of January. On average, I had 210 visitors per day in January.

Now, February has it and you can see my stats in the screenshot. Consistently doing the high-200s, or hitting the 300 mark. It’s not bad, I can see progress for sure.

One thing I’ll note is this - There is a strong correlation between the daily visits and the frequency of your posts. The 1 day I went for more than 24 hours without writing a post, my visits dropped drastically, AND my feedburner subscription # dropped to a single digit! And when I wrote 3 posts a day, the visits could increase by about 50%, or sometimes more! I’ve been tracking this every single day since I started my blog and I strongly stand by the theory of writing often enough. And each article has to have some meaning in it, of course.

I’m not trying to boast my figures. It’s nothing. It’s not bad for a start, but it’s nothing. But I do have some strong theories and I’ve made great progress, so I intend to share these things with you fellow bloggers and readers. Where there is a will there is a way. That’s all I’ll say (no rhyme intended).

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Blog Consulting and Advice, Marketing and Media, Software, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.