xorsyst
Well I can’t believe it’s already April. I spent much of my morning looking at all the April Fools jokes going around like Google’s Virgil Pioneer, John Chow’s UberAffiliate Review (which I fell for), and Darren’s PayPerTweet service. Great stuff this year.
If you are a regular reader of xorsyst.com, you may have noticed I have a new layout thats completely different from the graphics heavy layouts I usually have. I got away from my usual heavy layouts for something minimal and focuses more on content. I have already seen an improvement in pageviews, comments, and average time on the site. It feels a little weird to be writing this post because I am usually really secretive with stats, and behind the scenes stuff for this site. But I feel as though being open is the better approach, and it may help you with your own site.
My goal with xorsyst.com is to become a fairly large site for Otaku and pop culture stuff. To my friends who I describe my site to, I compare my content to stuff that can be found on a typical day watching G4TV. Some of you that speak to me on Twitter and IM may already know of my secret plans to be featured on Attack of the Show. But that’s for another post. Thanks to all of the new people I have met over the past few months, and all of my new RSS subscribers. You are the reason xorsyst has grown so rapidly! Now for all the juicy stats…
I do a lot of research about things I post here on the site. I seriously could write my own ebook by the amount of time and resources I use for finding content and analyzing stats. I really do have a stats addiction problem. Everything from placement of content and pictures to post titles has a reason. The content I post I believe my readers would find interesting. My passion is Otaku related news, and American pop culture. So that’s my first and foremost goal. However, to become big in this crowded blog scene, one needs to blog for traffic as well. What I mean by blog for traffic is some of my posts, while may not seem very content heavy, have been chosen to cater to what people are searching for in Google, MSN, and Yahoo search engines. I have seen a lot of potential and results in doing this already.
You may have noticed that button on my left side bar. Thats a really cool and useful free service offered by Amung.us. It lists the amount of people that are on this site in real time. I also use their Firefox plugin that tells the user count on my Firefox status as well. Yesterday, that counter spiked to over 215 users because my Transformers 2 post got stumbled.
My traffic has been scaling up very nicely over the past 3 months. In January I had 2,286 unique visitors, February had 16,499 unique visitors. and in March I peaked at 30,191 unique visitors. That’s almost doubling visits each month. One may realize that is a very fast traffic increase, and I am starting to hit my first traffic plateau. I am happy with this level of traffic, however I have much more in store to continue this trend. My RSS feed broke 100 on the very last day of March (how fitting). As I write this, I currently have 101 feed subscribers.
I am debating keeping Entrecard going on this blog. While the service is very good for networking, I don’t feel as though many blogs in this niche utilize the service enough for it to warrant a prime position on my sidebar. I see much more traffic from other sources. This next week or so, I may play around with moving my Entrecard widget. My recommendation for building traffic is to definitely utilize Stumbleupon. I am amazed with how much traffic that site can send. I am an active stumbler, and submit / stumble more than just my own site. I believe that is key to having your stumble votes really count. Another suggestion if you do decide to start using Stumbleupon for your site. If you use wordpress, you may want to install the WordPress Super-cache plugin. Before I started using it, if I had more than 50 people on my site at one time, things slowed to a crawl. However even with over 200 visitors at one time that I received yesterday, xorsyst.com was fast and responsive! Definitely worth checking out. Their claim to making your server Digg proof seems to be a true one.
Add me as a friend on Stumbleupon, and catch me on Twitter! Good luck with your blog!
Top 10 traffic sources for March:
- Google 10,721 visitors
- Yahoo 3,784 visitors
- Vegapunk 3,611 visitors
- Direct Source 2,704 visitors
- Buzzfeed 1,376 visitors
- Stumbleupon 1,244 visitors
- Encyclopedia Dramatica 658 visitors
- Live 653 visitors
- MSN 522 visitors
- Due-East 505 visitors
Top 10 popular posts on xorsyst.com for March
- KeyholeTV: Watch Japanese TV Online for Free 7,846 visitors
- Frank loves Mririan 3,754 visitors
- Who is Mririan 3,503 visitors
- Online Naruto Games 3,458 visitors
- Naruto Character Quizzes 2,197 visitors
- Free English Doujinshi 5,68 visitors
- Top 10 Wii Games for 2008 420 visitors
- Japanese Schoolgirls or Schoolboys? 395 visitors
- The Real reason behind Nintendo’s Wii Shortage 350 visitors
- Barricade in the new Transformers 2 Movie 281 visitors
congrats on a great month mate ^_^. Keep up the good work and the visitors will just keep on flowing!
Same – congratulations as well!:D That is a definitely a phenomenal growth rate! And I can see why, now that I’ve browsed around your site a bit more. Low graphics+clean look FTW!
Just wondering if could find out what stats package you’re using? At the moment I’m relying on the default WordPress.com, Firestats and also SlimStat.
As for stats, I currently use / pay attention to: Google Analytics, WordPress stats, Quantcast, AWStats (default host stats), and Alexa.
I really like GetClicky’s stats service and there live view tab. Watching live hits is really addicting. If you have never used their service, definitely give them a try. I actually found out about GetClicky’s service from Japaipanese’s blog. I used it till my site outgrew their free service. I believe you have to have below 1000-1500 pageviews a day or something like that after the 1st month of service.
I cant wait for http://woopra.com/ to be released. I would consider paying for that service. I am signed up and waiting for an invite into the beta. There is another service similar to them that I signed up for months ago (beta), but the name escapes me.
Thanks for the info, xorsyst! I also forgot to mention I signed up for a service called http://www.reinvigorate.net/ which Woopra reminds me of. I don’t check it very often though as I’m still alittle bit confused by the interface at the moment. I’ll definitely take a look at Getclicky as my site only seems to be receiving 3-500 page views per day at the moment. Thanks again!
HEY! Thanks, that’s the site I was talking about that I signed up for months ago. I had totally forgotten the name, and thought I would never see it again. You got into the beta? Congrats. I still haven’t received anything from them.
You have a really nice site, it’s simple and clean. How long have you been doing this?
Thanks. How long have I been blogging? Started xorsyst.com in Dec 2001. Back then though, it was a very different site. More of a journal of sorts with my webcam. However the current site that you see I relaunched Dec 2007.
My usual layouts are really graphics heavy, and unconventional. I like being different. But with the focus on content, I needed to tone it down a bit. Here’s an example:
Flash Layout
http://xorsyst.com/misc/22.jpg
HTML Layout
http://xorsyst.com/misc/21.jpg
I see what you mean. It looks good though. I just started blogging< so I got a long way to go. But keep up the good work.
Definitely check out http://www.socialmarker.com and if you think a certain post has mass appeal, you can use that to spread your article around easier. Initially tho’, you are going to have to set up an account on each site you want to submit to. I get a bit of traffic from social bookmarking sites.
Thanks for the tip. stay up.
Hey, came in from Google. I’m bookmarking, thanks. 8)
i admire John Chow because of his innovative ways to gain traffic both from whitehat and greyhat methods..~’