1 month of service - CodeGobbler's first month site statistics

It's been exactly one month since I first started CodeGobbler.com and I thought I'd share some statistics from my first month of semi-professional blogging.

The first month of CodeGobbler's online presence has been an interesting one, and I have heard nothing but positive feedback from around the blogosphere. It's been a month about trying things out and exploring new ground.

At times, I have found it hard to come up with new and interesting content, whilst at other times the creative juice has been flowing steadily. In this first month I have written and published 25 articles.

What was popular

The top two articles (One form, many uses - server side jQuery with Jaxer and  Running server side processes via JavaScript with Jaxer) were picked up by both Aptana and Ajaxian.com and promoted on their home page. This drove large amounts of traffic to the site and has really helped set things in motion.

What wasn't so popular

Sometimes I have a problem and search the Internet for hours trying to find a solution. When I eventually find the solution, I post the answer here. These articles were never designed to be huge traffic builders. Their purpose is three-fold:

1. As a reference for myself
2. As a reference for others
3. To build small amounts of 'background' traffic.

Traffic stats

I guess the thing I have been most interested in so far are my basic site stats. I want to know how many people have visited my site, how many times my posts have been read and if people are enjoying them and coming back for more. To this end, it's the stats that are presented on the Google Analytics 'dashboard' page that I'm looking at here.

In CodeGobbler's first month online, it has had more than 3,500 unique visitors, viewing almost 7,000 pages between them. Each visitor viewed about 2 pages on average and spent an average time of 2:23 on the blog. These statistics are fairly reasuring and tell me that, in general, people have found my site useful.

Note: The two large spikes in the traffic graph are due to the two articles that I had republished on ajaxian.com.

Trafic sources

Most of my traffic has come from Google, which is a healthy sign as this is traffic that is organic and sustainable. Article promotion at Ajaxian and dzone have also helped drive substancial amounts of highly targetted traffic.

Google PageRank

I'm a believer in the 'sandbox' theory, which states that Google penalises new sites, simply for the fact that they are new and therefore potentially untrustworthy. Because of this, and the fact that Google released their last PageRank update shortly before I stared this site, CodeGobbler.com still has no page rank - No cause for alarms here.

Alexa Rank

Alexa, once thought to be the "be all and end all" of website ranking for advertising purposes, is now considered an inaccurate and irrelevant measure, largely due to the way it is calculated. That aside, it still interests me to see what they say, and it does have a bearing on how much I can charge for advertising slots. (performancingads.com display these statistics to potential buyers.)

Technorati Authority

This is one area where I'm not particularly happy with CodeGobbler's performance:

• Authority: 12
• Rank: 554,938

I think this is something that takes time to build, but as the word starts to get out and CodeGobbler begins to gain some respect in it's field, this will gradually begin to increase. You can help this process by adding CodeGobbler.com to your Technorati favorites right now...

RSS Subscribers

These stats speak for themselves.

Not bad for only one month but it could be better, so...

Subscribe to the rss feed
subscribe to the emailing list

Monitory gains

It wasn't until week two, that I began placing advertisements on the site. This started with Google Adsense and then in week three I added 125x125 ads from Performancingads.com. Google Adsense has proved to be next to worthless, earning me a massive $0.17, whist Performancingads.com have sold 2 of my 4 weekly slots for $2.50 each.

Clearly I'm doing something wrong with Google Adsense. Any suggestions how I could better here?

Other stats

• Number 17 @ blogtoplist.com (vote for me now)
• Number 8 @ topofblogs.com
• 2 diggs for "CSS shadows - A drop shadow roundup"

• 1 digg for "5 Drupal SEO modules - essential modules for all sites"

Goals for month 2

I think it's a good idea to set some targets for myself and for this site. I don't want to be unrealistic, but at the same time I do want to make myself work to achieve them. So...

• 5000 unique visitors
• 40 RSS subscribers
• PageRank 3 (is this even possible in month 2?!)
• Earn $25

Summary

So there you have it. Once month of blogging fun, lots of lessons learned, and a minuscule amount of petty cash in the bank. How does this stack up against your first month of blogging? What am I doing right? What am I doing horribly wrong?