I just realized I started this blog almost a year ago, on Nov. 14, 2014. I’m not going to do a “look back” at the year or make any self-congratulatory gestures for sticking with it for this long — I once had a private blog that I kept for nine years, so this is like breathing to me.
However, I love data so I thought it would be fun? cool? kind of interesting? hopefully not boring? to present what the analytics have to say.
Now, I have two systems for tracking all sorts of data on here, StatCounter, which is easy to understand, and Google Analytics, which is more challenging so I’m working toward becoming Google Analytics certified so I can understand the numbers behind the words, plus it could help me career-wise. Possibly.
Anyway, drumroll please…Here are the five posts that have received the most traffic:
Here’s what happens when you fight a parking ticket in the City of Philadelphia
The Philadelphia Parking Authority sucks and here’s why
The bathroom: Why it’s my favorite room in the house
Eulogy: What I said at my father’s funeral
Making sense of things after the loss of both parents
It’s funny but not at all surprising that my rants on the parking situation in Philly and the tyrannical Philadelphia Parking Authority have gotten so many hits, but hopefully the situations I wrote about helped someone out there.
A bit more interesting is looking at which post received the most traffic in the past month. It’s the one in which I described getting an envelope in the mail from my ex, How opening an envelope gave me closure.
It got double the amount of hits than any other post in the past 30 days, and a whole bunch were from the small suburban town where the people I refer to in the post happen to reside. I have no reason to believe anyone “from my past” reads this blog — why would they want to? Come on. Still, it’s funny, and entirely a coincidence, I’m sure.
More than 90 percent of my traffic has come from the U.S., followed by the UK, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Philippines, The Netherlands, Israel, Spain and China.
A handful of recent keywords that people typed into various search engines that brought them to my blog:
attorney general investigating cartledge memorials (I hope the AG is investigating this place because they ripped my dad off after my mom died)
poodle puppy dogs
lobsta chowda beeya
Jen Lawson
why the bathroom is my favorite room
philadelphia handicapped parking ticket
what to do after both parents are gone
Philadelphia Parking violation: Blocking HP ramp
Most of my traffic comes from Facebook because I post some of my entries there, but I’m trying to do so less. If anything it’s interesting to see how the stats shift when I just publish a post and don’t promote it.
The one sort of disappointing aspect of this past year in blogging is that I really haven’t grown my readership by very much. My focus has been learning the WordPress platform (it’s sort of complicated at first!) and trying to teach myself the mechanics of SEO rather than promoting my content. It’s okay if this is all it is because public recognition isn’t important to me, but I do feel like I’m falling asleep at the wheel when it comes to getting people to read what I’m writing.
It’s sort of confusing when some bloggers post mostly photos and share highlight reels of their lives and they have hundreds of followers, but like anything, you get out of it what you put into it. If I published three or four posts a week my traffic would jump, but then the quality would go down. I only write here when I have something really specific to say or some story to tell. I don’t think anyone is interested in the minutiae of my life.
Other bloggers, I’d love to hear from you! Have you gotten any traffic that’s made you go “hmm”? How do all of you people have so many damn readers and do I suck? No, seriously, what steps have you taken to grow your blog?
There is one interesting thing that struck me about my blog statistics. First thing you need to bear in mind is that I swear – a LOT – when I am writing. The second thing you need to bear in mind is what a large chunk of the population use the internet FOR…
When you put those two things together, you end out with an entertaining set of search results that have driven traffic to my posts – and also with a hilarious mental picture of how disappointed some people out there must have been with what they ended out getting 😛
Haha — that’s hilarious! You should write a post about that! Do you use Google Analytics? I haven’t been able to figure out how to find my search terms on there yet, but it’s easier on Stat Counter. Stat Counter doesn’t include Google searches, though, just dumb stuff on Bing, Yahoo and AOL. I’m sure the Google results would be far more entertaining 😀