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The Six Month, 100 Post Review of the Friuch Blog

By crooky | May 25, 2008

I want to apologize for and address the faltering editorial schedule of this blog. My original intent was to write about science and technology on Mondays, research methodologies on Wednesdays and the Business of Consulting on Fridays. While I’ve maintained a minimum of three posts per week since the beginning of December, 2007 - I’ve not always wrote on schedule or on topic.

With this being my 100th blog post, I thought it was time to take a good, hard look at the blog and what it’s been doing. Note: there were a few posts earlier in 2007 but assume that all numbers quoted below are referring to December 1, 2007 - present. All numbers are courtesy of Google Analytics.

1. Readership

In the past six months, this site has received 2,113 absolutely unique visitors. I want from 170 readers in December, 2007 to nearly 800 in May, 2008. That’s 470% growth! Not bad for a little blog like mine.

Readers are spending slightly less time on my site on average since December (down to 2:14 from 3:24 in December) but I chalk that up to the fact that I have a lot more people than friends and family reading my blog now. My bounce rate has also doubled from around 30% to nearly 60% but again, I think that’s due to the fact that people are finding content on my site through Google and content scrapers and if it isn’t exactly what they’re looking for, they bounce back out. I’m not worried about the bounce rate because it has held steady over the past few months.

The vast majority (77%) of my readership has only visited my site once. That’s fine. I have a core of about 150 (6%) people that have read nearly every posting. A full 10% of my readership has been to the site at least ten times.

2. Content

The most popular and controversial blog post that I have written to date has been my “Four Reasons Why I F*cking Love Jigsaw”. It got me more kudos and hate mail than anything I’ve ever written. It was also read by more than 500 people.

Anything I write about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (which I have hypothesized may split open our planet like an overripe melon this summer) get instant traffic.

Also articles that I write about GHG emissions, energy, vehicle fuel efficiency and the like gets lots of steady traffic.

What I don’t see a ton of traffic for are my posts about being self-employed or research methodologies. This is discouraging because that’s the stuff that I want people to read but it’s obviously less of a draw that the technology-related stuff I write about.

3. Traffic Sources

I’ve got a pretty good spread of visitors from three sources:

- 36% of the traffic I get is from people that either have my site bookmarked, are using my RSS feed or are entering my URL directly into their browser after seeing it on my business card.
- 34% of my traffic comes from other sites that link to my site.
- 30% of my traffic comes from search engines.

I’m happy about the direct traffic stat but I think over time, I’d like that number to go down. The better my word-of-mouth marketing is working, the smaller I would expect to see that number get.

The referral traffic is interesting. I get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon and from FreelanceSwitch. People are linking to my content through Facebook and two friends of mine have my blog in their blogroll. Those sites account for the bulk of my referral traffic. I get small amounts of traffic coming in from content scrapers and oddly enough, it’s the traffic from those sites that spend the most time digging through my posts.

The search engine traffic is also informative because Google Analytics breaks down the terms that people find you with. The #1 term people are finding my site with is my business name. That’s good news because it means that word of mouth marketing is working and people know the name of my business. The #2 term is my first and last name. This is kind of the same positive feedback as the first most searched term but this number is probably bloated by ex-gfs trying to find out if my life is a trainwreck without them. The rest of the search traffic is related to technology articles I’ve written about like CERN, the Volkswagen L1 and HHO Scams. The oddest find was when someone typed in “‘criminal intelligence analyst’ written exam” and spend nearly 20 minutes on my site reading more than 20 of my other posts. Someone from the RCMP, mayhaps? LOL.

Conclusions:

1. No one is particularly interested in the content about research methodologies so I’m dropping that from the editorial schedule unless it’s something really interesting to write about.

2. Even though the interest in my articles about being self-employed is minimal, I’m going to keep writing about it because I think long-term, that will be one of the things that keeps readers coming back to my blog.

3. I have obviously stumbled on an interesting niche with articles on technology - specifically ones about energy efficiency and emissions. I think I should write more often about these things.

So, the editorial schedule is officially abandoned but I will probably keep roughly to it, in spirit at least until we see what 200 posts brings - sometime near the end of 2008.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog and have any suggestions as to what you’d like to see me do with this site, let me know.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Business of Consulting |

One Response to “The Six Month, 100 Post Review of the Friuch Blog”

  1. JTankers Says:
    May 25th, 2008 at 2:35 pm

    Thank you for your posts related to the Large Hadron Collider.

    We have a new facts site at http://www.LHCFacts.org.

    Dr. Raj Baldev writes:

    “ … the scientists are fully aware that it is not a project without a grave risk to the life of the Earth.”

    (Dr. Raj Baldev is Director of the Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research)

    LHCFacts.org

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