One Month Summary

As you may have noticed, there have been some changes to the site. I have added a few things that I want to talk about. Additionally, I changed some of the formatting. Some of the changes are cosmetic, but some are features that I hope will increase the traffic to the site. Since I told you when I started the blog, that I would be chronicling the entire process. It's time to share the numbers. As you may recall, my goal in this was and still is to gain an audience for my materials. For the last month, I have tried quite a few things to pull in new traffic. You may have noticed the hit counter on the sidebar below the list of blog directories. It was one of the first customizations I did to the blog template I am using. There are several open source applications out there. All I did was google “hit counter”. I checked out a few and picked one that seemed to be the easiest to use. From the statistics gathered over the last month, here are the numbers: Page loads: 354 Unique Visitors: 149 First Time Visitors: 135 Return Visitors: 14 In case you don’t know what the numbers mean: Page loads: The number of times any of the pages on the blog were clicked. Unique Visitors: The total number of visitors both First Time Visitors and Return Visitors. First Time Visitors: The number of visitors that came to the blog. Return Visitors: The number of people that have visited more than once. My astute analysis tells me that I not getting the traffic I had hoped for. Since I have been monitoring my traffic, I knew that I was not getting to the number of people that want to. Additionally, I have not generated much new traffic to my Lulu site nor have I sold any additional copies of "Progressing Rapidly Over Uneven Terrain" or "Some Things Just Happen". Today, I decided to take the next step. Although, I have Google Adsense for content (the list of ads at the top) on my blog on the first day, I didn’t have all the features. Today I added Google Adsense for search and Google referrals. None of these will drive traffic, but they will earn revenue if people use them. The exciting part, at least for me, is that I signed up for Google AdWords. I am actually paying to advertise my blog over the web. So far, I have had two people click on my ads. It cost me a nickel a piece, but I think it’s money well spent. As far as writing goes, I have posted Chapter 10. If you haven’t noticed, the blog only goes back to Chapter 7. Something happened with the archiving. I added a link to the previous chapters on the sidebar. It has Chapters 1 to 7 posted there. Next time, I will get into the specifics of the Google tools. Can you tell I like Google? Tags: Fiction, Online Book, Rebeleyeball, Paul Gavin Copyright (c) 2006 Paul Gavin. All rights reserved.