Here’s my update on how my site is doing in terms of viewership, and what I think I can do better to improve that.
1) Week-by-week audience:
My audience has been spotty as best, as evident by this chart. That first initial burst when I set it up was mostly driven by my own publicity, as I gave the link out to my friends and on Twitter and asked what people thought of the layout/feedback on the first stories and things like that. I obviously didn’t do a good enough job of keeping that up though.
The spikes in traffic have been mostly due to my newer posts, and adding additional search terms and SEO to articles and stories I already have up, so it seems like that’s what I can work on now to keep driving traffic.
2) Top 5 Posts and Pages:
As expected, the basic homepage, about page and my resume are the three most viewed things on the site. My guess is that’s mostly from getting people initially in from the web or my flavors.me page, and then they click away. I think for my site, I need to integrate some more pictures, video or some sort of graphic to keep the interest level a bit higher. Right now I have a text heavy homepage, and while that works in terms of showcasing my work, it’s not the most intriguing way to build web traffic.
I plan on updating my work from this semester in the next few weeks, and I’m starting to realize how important it is to have pictures for every story, even those that I didn’t think I needed pictures for when I was doing the reporting.
I was sort of surprised to see that my petanque video post has gotten so few views, as that piece is the the one that’s gained the most traction online out of my work (I’ll show later).
3) Top 5 Search Terms
I guess it’s pretty cool my own name is generating some traffic for my site, but it’s also kind of frustrating that my work hasn’t done much at all. I think the biggest contributor to that is the lack of overall content on my site. It just shows I need to add more stories and more of my work, and that’s just things I need to do on my end. I also think I should add some more hyperlinks to my stories, and perhaps even more SEO words and search terms.
4) Top 5 Referrers
- Flavors.me
- My CUNY Journalism page
- My CUNY blog page
Most of the traffic to my site has been driven by searching for my name on Google, so I guess it’s not so surprising that people found my site via my CUNY page, but it’s still sort of strange. I think I need to do a lot more self-promotion in terms of just flat out linking my site more and more frequently, perhaps once or twice a week.
I think a good plan over the Summer and the next few weeks would be to add a new post every three or four days, and send that link out to gain traction.
5) Top 5 Clicks
- Flavors.me (Linked this on my Twitter feed about a month ago and added it in my signature on my email, works quite well).
- LinkedIn (I’ve been trying to build my connection base, and thankfully I’ve been getting a few click-throughs from there, mostly from old teachers and friends).
- Direct link to my resume (I was providing this link during my internship application email process).
- Direct link to my about page (Ditto from above).
- Google Profile (Just recently added this link, guessing one of my friends clicked it).
The thing I’ve noticed most from this list, is the places that I do online work at, or contribute to, that don’t link back to my website. For example, I’ve been contributing to The Local this semester, but aside from Googling my name, you can’t backtrack my info in any way. Ditto with other blogs and websites I’ve done articles for. That should change, and I’ve started to kickstart that. For example, I’ve asked to have my profile expanded on The Local, and it’ll now give a link to my twitter and my site.
Social Media Tracking
Twitter and tweeting is something that I’m trying to do more of. While I’ve had a twitter account for a while (I signed up in 2009), but really I only started tweeting regularly around February or so.
I’ve been trying to engage more in different discussions that go on (for example, I participated in a #wjchat the past two weeks, and had a number of direct @ statements). My follower base has started to grow (extremely slowly), but I have 19 followers now, compared to 4-5 about two weeks ago.
Similar to my website, I think the best way to further grow my twitter influence is to have that link provided on more places that I contribute to, as well as just increased activity.
Another Analytic – YouTube
These are the stats from my YT video about petanque that I did in the Fall. I really liked the way this video came out, and spoke to Sandeep then on how to try to drive traffic to it.
The way I got what I think is a relatively fair amount of views considering (over 700 in just under three months) is that I found petanque-interested sites, and asked them if they’d like to embed my video on their site, or do a blog post about it. In both cases, they said yes, and it drove traffic up for the video quite well.
In retrospect, it’s rather disappointing I really didn’t have my site set up then and couldn’t take real advantage of it from a social media/generating interest side of it, but it’s a way that I’ve found that works, and just indicates what I need to keep doing – keep updating and spreading my work.