My Top Traffic Sources and Lessons Thereof

Was checking the stats on my blog this morning and took a look at the top traffic sources since the blog began in 2010.

My single biggest source was www.alternatehistory.com, with 5,379 hits. Meanwhile, alternatehistory.com has 753 hits. Given how my blog has 60,000 hits total, this represents around 10% of my total traffic. Also, I've noticed my blog traffic has gone down during the recent months I've had myself blocked from posting on the message-board to avoid being distracted from my personal writing. This indicates my strategy of putting blog links in the signature of every post I make has been a successful traffic draw.

(For the record, this is the alternate-history forum I often mention in conversation.)

Meanwhile, google.com has brought in 5,043 hits, with google.co.uk bringing in 437, google.ca 408, and google.au 169. That's combined around 6,000 hits, another 10% of my traffic total. This shows the power of the Google search engine and possibly why putting one's blog on Blogger (which is part of Google) is a good idea.

Facebook brought in 1,496 hits. I typically post blog links on my profile page and on my Facebook fan page Matthew W. Quinn, Speculative Fiction Writer. Although this doesn't seem to have been the hit-getter I thought it was, I do recall getting a lot of hits on my recent post on why I'm voting Libertarian this year. I'm going to keep this strategy up.

A surprisingly large source of hits was the Starcraft Wikia, with 1,302 hits. Here's how it happened. In the summer of 2011, I bought some Facebook advertising (I can't remember how much) and after some trial and error, decided to narrowly target it to a certain few things. One of those things was Starcraft, since I had been blogging a fair bit about Starcraft II, a tie-in novel I outlined and planned to propose to Blizzard, and some suggestions I had for the future of the Starcraft storyline. Some of these links ended up in the Starcraft Wikia and have been bearing fruit since. Lesson: Facebook advertising is good, as is narrowly targeting it. I considered buying some Facebook advertising for my two short stories available on Amazon.com, but I'd need to move some very large numbers in order to break even (for $50 worth of advertising, I'd need to sell 150 copies).

Last of these outside traffic sources is Wikipedia, with 158 hits. After DragonCon one year (I can't remember if it was 2011 or 2010), I put some links to my DragonCon blog posts there, in particular those relating to S.M. Stirling and his Draka, Island in the Sea of Time, and Emberverse novels. I think one of the links got purged, but others are still there.

Finally, last of all traffic sources period is the blog itself, with 149 hits. This seems to indicate that visitors to the blog visit one page or another but don't go from page to page very often.

One of the sources not listed at all was my personal Twitter feed. I have definitely gotten blog hits from tweeting my blog posts (t.co being the source listed), but it doesn't seem like I've gotten very many. I also haven't been getting many blog hits from guest blog posts. However, I haven't done very many of those and I haven't done those until recently, so that should be expected.