March In Review
- April 1st, 2008
- COMMENTS 5
Wow, what a month. Before I begin writing about March, I want to let everyone know that I’m trying my best to follow these three steps to embracing success as written by Freelance Switch - I hope this post doesn’t come across as bragging, as it certainly shouldn’t. After all, there have been many bloggers before me who have done much better with their websites. Instead, this is a post to let you all know how Elite By Design is developing as a blog and as a community. Thank you all for your support and your help in keeping this blog alive for the past four months. I’m so excited and want to share this excitement with you!
So let’s begin:
Articles
March started out quite regularly. I was averaging 400 unique visitors per day for the first three days. Not too bad, I thought. That all changed though when I wrote the following two posts:
25 Most Inspiring Website Designs
23 Most Incredible Photoshop Tutorials
These two posts alone drew in over 64 comments, 24 links back, as well as bringing in the huge majority of the traffic for this month. What made these posts so successful was social bookmarking. My first article, 25 Most Inspiring Website Designs, received over 50 thumbs up in Stumble Upon in a matter of hours. This caused a huge tidal wave effect, sending thousands of visitors my way in just a couple days. Within the next three days, with the help of 23 Most Incredible Photoshop Tutorials, traffic truly took off.
23 Most Incredible Photoshop Tutorials received well over 50 thumbs up in just a couple hours. This post also hit the front page of Del.Icio.Us - a first for Elite By Design. This combination sparked a buzz that allowed dozens of other sites to pick up on this article and publish it to their own blogs thus creating a chain reaction of traffic.
As of this minute, 23 Most Incredible Photoshop Tutorials has been viewed over 100,000 times. A respectable figure for a single article in my opinion.
25 Most Inspiring Website Designs has been viewed over 35,000 times. Again, a respectable figure.
Those two posts launched a traffic wave that was able to remain fairly steady for the rest of the month with the help of the rest of my articles written over the next few weeks.
Comments
This month has also been a great one on Elite By Design because of such widespread activity and participation by all of my readers. Let me begin this section by giving a warm thank you to my top three commentators for this month:
These readers really showed involvement with all of my articles by providing feedback, opinions, and input. I really can’t tell you how much it means to have people give their time to support this website and to keep the conversations alive. Thank you!
This month totaled over 165 total comments on all of the articles. This is a really great number for month four on Elite By Design. I look forward to getting this number even higher next month!
Traffic
Ah, here come the numbers. To tell you the truth, this month blew me out of the water in terms of the amount of traffic that came to Elite By Design. This month brought in more than ten times the number of visitors than in February. So here’s the numbers, do with them what you will:
Total Unique Visitors: 100,136
Total Visits: 135,574
Total Page Views: 246,928
Average Daily Visits: 4,373
Average Daily Page Views: 7,965
Like I mentioned earlier, the first three days of March I was averaging 400 visitors per day. So you can image my surprise to see that number multiplied more than 10 times at the end of the month.
The smallest traffic day was on March 2 with 400 unique visitors. My largest day was 13,111 unique visitors on March 16.
My five largest sources of traffic are the following websites, in order of largest to smallest (in terms of traffic it sent):
Stumble Upon
Delicious
Google
Tutorialized
Google Images
The rest of the sites linking to me trickle down in terms of traffic. I will say, though, that by getting onto the front page of Delicious, 23 Most Incredible Photoshop Tutorials was picked up by content aggregators from around the web - some of which sent over 800 visitors each!
Guest Posting
As I’ve mentioned in another post, this month was the first time I’ve ever used guest posts. Three amazing bloggers helped me out this month by writing three amazing guest posts:
I want to take this time to tell everyone that if you would like to submit a guest post to Elite By Design, any post submitted will be considered for publication.
I am hoping to start receiving regular guest postings on Elite By Design to help bring in more creative thinkers and continue to spark conversations among the readers. If you would be interested in guest posting for Elite By Design, just drop me an email! Why should you guest post? One reason - you are allowed to link to your own website!
Why is that important? Well take a look at the numbers I just posted - 100,000 visitors. That means that your article would be read thousands of times thus making the link to your website accessible to, thousands of people. Great incentive if I do say so myself.
If you are interested in this opportunity, just email me anytime - I would love to start working with you!
Advertising
Last, but not least, I wanted to talk about advertising on Elite By Design. I am hoping to start attracting about four regular sponsors of this blog every month.
I will be short and to the point - one month of advertising on EBD costs $75. Your advertisement will be seen on every page in the site. March had almost 250,000 page views - that means that your advertisement would have been seen that many times as well!
If you are interested, feel free to check out my Advertising page to get the latest information. Should you choose to become a sponsor, just drop me an email!
That’s it, everyone. I sure hope that this post didn’t come off as bragging. Yes, I am admittedly very excited about this past month considering that this is Elite By Design’s fourth month in existence. I really appreciate everyone who has subscribed, commented, and read my articles. I look forward to next month and the journey that awaits!
It really is a testament to the work you put in Brian, not sure if you are really surprised with the amount of positive feedbacks, thumbs-ups, digg’s etc. You create outstanding posts, links and tutorials. YOu keep your subject content on track.
It’s concise, precise and valuable.
I really am not ‘ass’ licking here. Praise where praise is due, and the figures ofcourse back-all that up. I certainly noticed a knock on effect from the guest post. At one time over the weekend, I had about 50 people actually online at once. That sort of freaked me out, man, the pressure.
You continue as you have been, thus responses by readers will continue and grow. It’s just if you can keep it up, because it is pressure. There is no doubt about it. it can go from being part-time and enjoyable when you want to, to having to impress, provide and create daily. So dig in…
Well done. :0)
Thanks for all the mentions the past few days, Brian. It was nice to help you out a bit, just wish I had checked my email earlier in the day so I could have had a few more hours to make the post longer and a little better.
Glad to see you are seeing some success Brian! I ended up selling my blog back in January and took a little break from blogging since then. Just thought I’d pop in and see how things were going here, and it looks like things are awesome. Congrats, and good luck in the future. I am considering starting up another marketing type blog and, if I do, I’ll definitely be hoping to do some guest posting here.
Thank you for the kind comments.
It really means a lot
@Baller Blogger - Send me a guest post anytime
@Graham and @Gary - I’m open for guest posts anytime - just drop me an email!
Thanks for the link back to WebDiggin. We didn’t expect it, but it’s actually a neat way to encourage comments. The top commentators will change from month to month, but by posting a link in your month’s summary, you can reward the people who contributed and encourage future commentators. I’ll have to put it on my to-do list!