Income Diary has come a long way in the past year, with the hiring of writers who can take the strain off of Michael, so that he can focus on other aspects of the website, meaning that there’s less of a strain on him, which ultimately results in better content from everyone. The workload has been shared between four people this year, and the quality, and regularity of content, has certainly improved.
Traffic
When we look at traffic, it’s always relative, but the trick is to know what you’re comparing it to. If we were to compare our traffic to Google, then that would mean nothing, but fortunately we’re at a point now, after a few years, that we can compare ourselves to ourselves, to see how we’ve improved, and more importantly, where we’ve gone wrong. I suggest that everyone does one of these for their website every few months, because it’s only by doing a full analysis that you can really tell how well your website is doing – you might be surprised by your results. For example, did you think that IncomeDiary’s top 3 referring cities are New York, London, and New Delhi?
Comparison of Traffic
We can start by simply comparing the amount of traffic we’ve received this year, to the traffic we had last year. No surprises here really that the website has grown, I mean, you’d expect nothing less from people who run a blog about blogging and making money online. The most important elements to study here is not how much traffic we’ve had, but where it’s come from. Only when you start to study your referrers will you truly understand how your website has grown, and how you can help it to grow in the future.
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Traffic Sources
When we start to look at traffic sources, we start to understand how we’ve become so popular, and what we’ve been doing right. It also exposes the areas where we’re not getting much traffic, and we need to improve. By far the biggest referrer this yeah has been Google, and it’s up by 150% from last yeah, which is a huge growth, and worth a lot of money to us. Google is my favourite form of traffic because there’s around a 75% chance that when someone comes to the website, they’ve never visited it before, which only goes to help grow the website by exposing it to a larger audience.
As you can see, we’ve had over 400,ooo people visit us from Google, which is quite astounding really, and that’s the result of an investment into an SEO specialist. The investment has clearly paid off though as we rank very highly for many different terms, which I’ll cover further down the post.
Other noticeable differences are that our direct traffic is up too, by 58.86%, and that would likely be accounted for by the increased list size, because the majority of people who click on links, would do so through a mail client, and that counts as direct traffic, rather than referred traffic.
There are four other main referrers that are worth mentioning, the first of which is Facebook. IncomeDiary relies so much on a list, and Google, that Facebook isn’t really a big part of how we get traffic, or at least it hasn’t been in the past. This is because joining a mailing list is much like Facebook, and we would rather have a list than Facebook, so that has been our focus. In the past few months though, I’ve been focusing a lot more of my attention on growing Facebook, and getting the numbers up, because it can never hurt. Traffic from Facebook has gone up this year by 145.65%, from 7,001 to 17,198. If you like our content, then I would encourage you to like us on Facebook and take part in some of our polls and conversations.
Twitter has been another big contributor this year, providing us with nearly 6,123 this year, compared to nothing last year. There’s a reason for this. When Twitter first came out, you could market much more aggressively, following hundreds of people a day, which helps to build your following. Because of this, we now have over 15,000 people following us, which are all people we can market to. This was left alone for a while, much like Facebook was, but unlike Facebook, as soon as you start Tweeting again, people will see them, and you don’t have to wait to be deemed worthy enough for your followers to see your content. Since I took on the Twitter marketing in August, I’ve started setting up Twitter to automatically tweet around 5 times a day, as well as tweeting whenever we publish new content. 2 simple plugins are doing all the hard work, and contributing to our traffic like this:
Our traffic from Reddit this year is up by 6,613.75%, but before you get too excited, it’s not as special as it sounds. Last year we only got 80 people from them, but this year it was 5,371. That’s the great thing about Reddit though, it’s bonus traffic if you’re not submitting it yourself. Someone else had submitted an article related to how much Google was making per second, and it got lots of upvotes on Reddit, which meant lots of traffic for us. Whether that provided us with more money is hard to tell, but it exposed our website to people who may not have seen it before.
StumbleUpon also provided us with some traffic this year, but it’s noticeably down from last year, by just over 60%. SU is hard traffic to predict, because it’s mostly used as a time waster, so it’s dependant on the content that you’re writing at the time. As you start to exhaust the basics in your niche, you’re forced to slightly diversify your content, which means that certain referrers are less interested, which is what happened here. It’s no secret that SU isn’t the best quality of visitor in the world, so it’s not really much of a problem.
Search Engine Traffic
Search engine traffic now makes up for roughly half of all the traffic that we receive, which I’m sure you’ll agree, is quite an achievement. By studying the search engine traffic, you get a really good sense of how people browse the internet, and what they’re mostly searching for. Have a look at the comparison between the last two years worth of search engine traffic, and you’ll see lots of little, regular grooves in the timeline. If you haven’t worked it out already, these grooves are the weekends for every week. It just goes to show that weekends are bad times to be sharing content, because people are using their computers a bit less. Note* The dip in September was because we changed themes and forgot to include the GA code.
The most important aspects to understanding your search engine traffic is to look at the keyword phrases people are using to get to your website. Phrases such as ‘income diary’ and ‘michael dunlop’ don’t mean anything to us, because they’re people who have been to the site before and are trying to get back here again; they’re using Google as a lazy address bar.
The results you want to look out for are ones that sum up what you do, rather than just your content. For example, when you remove the terms that relate to our website, the top three results are ‘online earning sites’, ‘top earning websites’, and ‘entrepreneur quotes’. Now this is always good to have for traffic, and has fed ID with thousands of visitors, but they all relate to specific posts that we have written. They have all had an improvement in traffic in the past year, ranging between a 36% to 440%. The thing about these search terms though is that they relate to largely out of date posts; ones that have since been replaced with new content, but more on that later.
The best search term that we have going for us so far is ‘how to make money blogging’, which comes in at number four (after you take out the irrelevant terms). This terms sums up our website, so to know that we’re ranking for it is a really good thing. I would love to rank for ‘photography tutorials’ on ExpertPhotography. Think how good your website would do if it ranked for a term that was relevant to your website like that. We’re not the top search result, but that’s not important, as for now, getting ranked at all is the important part. We’ve gone from 11 hits for this term last year, to 2600 this year, and judging by the graph below, I expect it to grow further. The most interesting factor to consider here is not the number of results, but the type of people they’re reaching, which in our case this year, is 81.61% new visitors. We also rank for ‘make money blogging’ and ‘how to make money online’.
Quality of Visitor
This is something that I’ve become a little bit obsessed with recently because I have a small following compared to some other photography websites, so I try to focus on a quality following. By this, I mean people who stay for a long time on the site, and people who look at more than one page. As you may expect if you’ve ever looked at the engagement statistics for your website, the majority of people who view this website stay for 10 seconds or less. This is standard for most websites, and there’s a variety of reasons for this ranging fromthe loading speed of the page, the accuracy of the page, to the size of the post, and the style in which it’s written. Not forgetting peoples attention spans.
The quality of visitor has actually deteriorated over the past year, with more people staying for 10 seconds or less than the year before, and less people staying for more than a minute. This isn’t too much of an issue for us as it’s pretty standard for any website which receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each yeah – when the majority of visitors is poor, it stands to reason that you’ll start to see more of them as your website grows.
When you look at the frequency at which the visitors view your website, you can start to gather how engaged a reader is, and how likely they are to come back again, whether it’s of their own accord, or they sign up to a list. The results fluctuate between the different bands of frequency, but when the views start to get up between 9-50 views in a year, this year has improved on last year, and accounts for around 10% of our visitors.
Top Content
If you read my post yesterday on our top 20 blog posts, then you’ll know that our top 20 blog posts this year were all, except for one, written in either 2010 or 2009. I found this very interesting for two reasons; our old stuff is still very popular, and because our new stuff isn’t as popular. To fully understand why this is so, you have to look at the referrals for the the content, and find out where people have come from to find the content.
Out top blog post is Top Earning Blogs, and it also happens to be the top landing page after the homepage, and the same goes for the second and third most popular posts. This means that people have been linking to this page, rather than having people find it on the site themselves. These are our most popular search terms, and even though they’re linking to a couple of out of date posts, the content is still relevant and provides us with the exposure we need to continue to grow the list, teach more people, and sell more products. In my opinion, there’s no such thing as bad traffic.
How we can Move Forward in 2012
After everything that we’ve learned by studying our traffic for the year, we have a much better understanding of what works well for our website, and what we need to do to improve. Firstly, the SEO side of the website is clearly working really well, but there’s still a way to go to really compete with some other sites in our niche. SEO is a huge part of how we reach our traffic, so this needs to be focused on, but not so that we ignore other elements. First of all we need to start building on our Facebook following, because even though we have a huge email list, it can never hurt to receive extra traffic. Seeing as we can post links on Facebook five times a week, it would be a shame to miss that. I’ve recently been looking into the effectiveness of Facebook ads, so that’s something we can try, and then write about in the future, to hopefully benefit you.
It’s the referral traffic that we need to work on, so as well as working on our Facebook, there are a few new techniques I want to try with Twitter in the new year. I won’t go into the details here, but it should prove to be very powerful. People often underestimate the power of Twitter, for both providing traffic to a website, and also convincing people to like your fan page. With a little bit of experimenting over time, I think we can get both Twitter and Facebook to a point at which it’s growing at a much more regular pace. Every little helps.
There’s no search feature on IncomeDiary, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that once something leaves the home page, it’s usually lost to most people. You could find it through SEO smart links, or by exploring the author’s posts, but visitors will most likely be missing content that may be of use to them. I have the same problem with ExpertPhotography, the only difference being is that I do have a search feature, it just sucks. What I propose is that we find a reasonable way to archive these different posts, through the use of categories and keywords, and then should someone want to explore the articles, it will be very easy to do so.
Overall, 2011 has been a very good year for IncomeDiary, and when you work hard on the internet, particularly something that’s your own idea, it gives you inspiration for new projects that are even better than the one you have. We’re always coming up with new ideas for content, or development of the website, such as the new answers section, so there’s no doubt that 2012 will be even more successful.
To Your Success, and Happy New Year,
From the IncomeDiary Team.
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