Matt’s Journal

A small post to let you know that this blog has just surpassed 200,000 hits in five months! After having a few lapses with my statistics recording, the traffic for this site has only been recording since 11th January 2008.

It’s a big achievement and a big thank you goes out to the people who subscribe to the RSS and visit this blog, your dedication is appreciated!

Granted they are only hits, we have had more than 20,795 unique visitors in that time.

Here’s to the million!

Stumbleupon was one of the first social sites that I used, it’s been around so long, most people couldn’t have told you it was classed as a social site until the Web2.0/Myspace/Facebook era came into effect.

Stumbleupon started off as a way to “stumble upon” fun and interesting websites submitted by it’s users. As the years have passed and the social aspect of media has come to the fore, users have been able to recommend links to each other, communicate via the site and of course has attracted a lot of self marketers.

I won’t lie to you, I submitted a few of my most popular articles to see if it would bring in a new user base who wanted to read my content, it was shameless self promotion. Did it work? Yes.

I have submitted the same sites to Digg and to Mixx, these sites heavily relying on people to find my article, take the time to read it and then decide whether it was worth a vote. These sites had driven no more than 30 unique hits to my website.

Below is a report from the last month from my Google Analytics:

To put this in perspective, I only submitted links to Stumbleupon this week. The 28 hits from Mixx are based on three submissions over a monthly period. The sheer number of people that have “stumbled” on this site have produced the one comment and a rise in 4 RSS subscribers, I can only say thankyou to the people who found my content interesting.

I will not submit every blog post on this site, I have only submitted a few pages that would genuinely interest a viewer. Stumbleupon to me is a fair and useful way of finding content, it brings back the element of chance that people can find my submissions and vote on them from their toolbar. I will continue to promote Mixx as I would rather promote good content than my own, but Stumbeupon does bring interesting sites to you….fast.

Here are a few facts you maybe interested in knowing about this blog:

1. I started this blog in January 2006, meaning it will be two years old come the New Year.
2. There are currently 201 posts and 293 comments, contained within 27 categories and 119 tags on this blog.
3. Since the 8th June 2007, this blog has had 81904 hits and 7520 complete sessions.
4. Since applying Adsense, this blog has generated $104.06 (around £51).
5. In the two years it’s been active, the blog has been redesigned around 10 times (I can never see it ending!).
6. I get more hits from the US than from my native UK (US = 63%, UK only = 2.83%).
7. This blog has always run on Wordpress (self hosted), except for the 2 weeks in January 2006 when it got spammed to death on another platform.
8. The most popular pages are: Barclays PinSentry, Using TVersity to stream to your Xbox 360 and Faster Download Speeds with uTorrent.
9. Akismet has protected my site from 6,844 spam comments.

It’s interesting to look back and see how it all started, I hope it continues to grow and people enjoy reading it.