April 2008 stats for xorsyst.com

Well another month has passed by on xorsyst.com. April was such a great month for me, as well as for the blog. I have moved to Jacksonville FL to be closer with family, and so far I am enjoying the city. I haven’t lived on the Atlantic coast since I was a kid. So its nice to see real waves for once.

Ok, on to the stats.

Unique visitors for April totaled out at 71,368. Last month, I had 45,178 pageviews (Google Analytics), WordPress reported that number was actually 48,719. I didn’t think I would double that number again for the 3rd month in a row, and I gave myself a more conservative goal of around 80,000 pageviews. However, not only did I surpass 80,000 pageviews for the month of April, I doubled it yet again! My official pageview count is 104,613. I can honestly say doubling that yet again to 200,000 pageviews seems like a hefty goal, and maybe unrealistic. But hey, I can try! The RSS subscription is at around 190 readers as I write this. Thanks everyone that found my blog worthy enough to be added to your reader! Also, with the next Alexa update, I should be even lower. I cant wait.

So what did I do differently to gain this much traffic? Along with my usual research of what to write about that contributed greatly to the increase of stats, I tried a few new things this month. One of the biggest gainers in my referrers was Dannychoo’s Otaku.FM. If you have an Anime/Otaku/Japan related blog, I would highly recommend you make an account there and get your RSS feed on Otaku.FM. Not only have I seen an increase of traffic, but also I have seen many new visitors and comments from others with blogs. My only regret with Otaku.FM is that I didn’t have my site on there sooner.

I have also begun to use Project Wonderful for not only offering advertising on this site’s sidebar, but to advertise this site elsewhere. Project Wonderful offers unbelievably cheap advertising on many different types of sites. Without giving you the exacts (you can easily find the site I am talking about in Project Wonderful‘s directory), I was able to purchase a banner on a site that has over 200,000 pageviews a day for only $0.20! Yep, that’s 2 dimes for 200,000 pageviews. All sorts of deals exist on Project Wonderful if you take the time to look. At some point of another, if you want your blog to become even bigger, you are going to need to advertise it, and get your blog out in front of people that might find it interesting. Project Wonderful is an easy first step that wont cost you an arm and a leg.

And like usual, I recommend becoming active on social networks, Stumbleupon especially. For March, Stumbleupon was ranked #6 for my top 10 traffic sources. For April, it was ranked #2 just behind Google. I am beginning to understand what goes viral on Stumbleupon, and I am starting to concentrate some of my posts just for Stumbleupon. I am also using a cool program called Stumbleupon Alerter that alerts you to when someone reviews your submission, and lets you know when something is going viral. They also have a Digg version available. Some of the posts that got a lot of traffic on Stumbleupon:

• Death Note movie theater list
• Hello Kitty Cocaine Ring
• The best Fanservice / Ecchi Anime titles

With my increase of traffic, I have decided to venture into private advertising. As a reader, the only thing that you will notice is that the banners on my sidebar will change, but that’s it. Same size, same location. I have bought a plugin that I have been experimenting with all week. I feel it was a good purchase as it will handle everything I need. It’s called OIOPublisher. The feature list is too long for me to talk about here, so if you are thinking about private advertising for your blog, you may want to check it out.

Top 10 traffic sources for April (visitors)

• Google (20,449)
  
• Stumbleupon (16,098)
  
• Direct (5,818)
• Yahoo (4253)
• Encyclopedia Dramatica (1442)
  
• Otaku.FM (1247)
• Live (1074)
• Buzzfeed (828)
• MSN (790)
• ICI Japon (401)

Top 10 popular posts on xorsyst.com for April (visitors)

• Barricade in New Transformers 2 Movie (8,356)
• KeyholeTV: Watch Live Japanese TV for Free (8,208)
• Free English Doujinshi (5,470)
• Online Naruto Games (5,264)
• Rockstar Bento Boxes (5,091)
• Frank loves MRirian! (4,888)
• Who is MRirian? (3,453)
• Naruto Character Quiz (2,736)
• Dragonball Z Movie Pictures (1,857)
• Top 10 Wii Games for 2008 (1,817)

After debating whether or not to use Google Analytics as a true representation of my stats, I have chosen to use a combination of programs each suited to a particular stat. The bad part about relying on Google Analytics is that the user must have Javascript enabled for it to count. For security reasons, many people have Javascript disabled, and I feel it affects the overall count of users. Therefore, for my blog pageviews, I am going to use the WordPress stats plugin offered by the makers of WordPress. I feel as though if I am after pageviews of my blog, then using this service who’s only goal is to count the number of times a certain post or page is viewed is better suited for the job. I feel that its a much more accurate count too.

With that same idea in mind, I am also going to use my server’s built in statistic pages to count the number of unique visitors. Again, it doesn’t matter what the user has enabled or disabled, if the server sees a visitor hit a page, it is going to count that user. I am not alone. Many sites tend to use AWStats as their stats program of choice. I finally understand why.