In the first phase of my portfolio’s site development, I have blocked the site off from search engines and instead focused on selectively marketing the site specific people that I am reaching out to via email. Why? Because I’m not quite ready to put the site out there as representative of my digital brand because I don’t think it’s there yet. So with that caveat, the two primary sources of my traffic through three months are from this class site and through email.
The site’s traffic has declined steadily with some exceptions, but that doesn’t accurately represent the site’s impression on those I’ve targeted it to. For instance, when I was working towards internships in March and April, I included a link to my portfolio site with each email I sent. I sent more than twenty unique emails to different different employers and found that traffic spiked on the days I did this. This showed me that my recipients were clicking on the site at an incredibly high rate. In some cases, there were many more clicks than emails I sent, showing that employers were forwarding my site to others and they too were clicking.
The top 5 all-time posts have been, in order, “Homepage,” “Who Is Geoffrey Decker?”, “Resume” and two links to stories I have written (one about bedbugs in schools and another about the arrest of protesters on World AIDS day).
In the most recent 30 days, the most popular pages have been, in order, the homepage and four links to stories. All but one of them, interestingly, were about running and all but one were multimedia stories.
Social Metrics Tracking:
I averaged more than four tweets per day in the month of April. Since I began tweeting more actively in March (89 tweets), I’ve slowly seen the number of followers increase. I’ve gained 25 new followers in these months, which is still under what I would hope for. I’ve belonged to twitter for more than two years and these two months account for just under 20 percent of my total tweet count (1041), showing I am more active on twitter than ever.
In various rankings by different twitter analytic sites, I’ve generally been ranked as an active user with a moderate degree of influence. Klout indexed me at 32, and classified me as an “explorer” on twitter. I “actively engage in the social web, constantly trying out new ways to interact and network,” according to Klout, which also notes that I’ve been retweeted 25 times.
Twitalyzer classified me as a “social butterfly,” someone who is very active within my individual network.
