Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Friday 30 December 2011

Blog stats for this blog part two

I wrote a post on the stats for this blog back in January 2011 and thought I'd update things. Despite a mild worry that it's a bit like saying "here's how much money I've got in the bank" I thought it might be of interest to others, and it will be of interest to me this time next year - I don't really know how my stats compare for an average blog. 

As observed in the previous post I seem to get random hits mostly from Google and this appears to be 'long tail' stuff in that each post gets a gradual increase in the number of hits overall but there's nothing too dramatic, bar one or two popular posts. And of course Google's own spiders visit my blog and crawl everything so I suspect quite a lot of the hits are non-living readers.

The blog itself is a bit of a mish-mash and isn't really about anything in particular - I'm glad I gave it an appropriate title at least. I suppose overarching themes might include skepticism, jobs in science communication, Twitter tools, nerdy pursuits and cinema but there's some random stuff in there too. I think if you were trying to build an audience or a niche you might want a blog that is a bit more coherent but I like to think the internet has enough space for everyone.

The picture below shows the number of hits per month, I've added in the letters myself, but it doesn't appear to have any information about stats in 2010. I believe these are pageviews rather than visitors (individual people) but I haven't delved too much into it.















From my previous post on this it appears that this information started to become available from within Blogger (without having to visit Google Analytics) in July 2010 so I'm doubly surprised that 2010 info is absent, but each spot reads as follows.

May 2009 - 0 and A June 2009 - 0 - 2 posts
B July 2009 - 3,632 - 4 posts
C August 2009 - 3,236 - 6 posts
D September 2009 - 3,384 -  9 posts
E October 2009 - 3,369 - 14 posts
F November 2009 - 6,336 - 4 posts
G December 2009 - 3,394 - 6 posts

2010 - absent data (77 posts in total: 9,7,7,9[April]; 2,10,4,9[August]; 5,6,4,5[December])

H January 2011 - 3,938 - 5 posts
I February 2011 - 3,630 - 10 posts
J March 2011 - 5,532 - 6 posts
K April 2011 - 4,641 - 11 posts
L May 2011 - 4,584 - 3 posts
M June 2011 - 5,838 - 5 posts
N July 2011 - 4,120 - 5 posts
O August 2011 - 4,901 - 7 posts
P September 2011 - 6,766 - 3 posts
Q October 2011 - 6,813 - 6 posts
R November 2011 - 7,982 - 11 posts
S December 2011 - 4,899 so far (25 December 2011) - 14 posts (so far)

At the time of writing (30 December 2011) the December 2011 total has recently increased to 6795 and the number of blog posts written this month is at 16 (this will be the 17th). Much of this spike is due to a small prophecy coming true, about the PR for a product called Nuratrim ;)

Edit: 5 February - final tallies for December 2011 and January 2012
December 2011 - 7,226 - 18 posts
January 2012 - 8,137 - 10 posts

Some of my posts I mention on Twitter a few times because I really want people to see them or know about something - eg my post on tools for Twitter, but with some others I don't bother as they might just be things I want to record for myself for later. In either case the majority of any hits come from Google keywords (as a librarian I suppose I am at least fairly good at titling and tagging my posts correctly, when I remember to do it that is) rather than from following a link on Twitter, however the blog post that indirectly led to the NerdyDayTrips.com map is an exception as it was tweeted by Ben G and so there are a couple of spikes there that relate to that. In short, for most of my posts tweeting about them doesn't make that much of an impact, but occasionally it does. All my blog posts are also fed into FriendFeed and I expect I will get around to migrating my Blogger profile to Google+ profile, although I don't really use G+ at the moment.

The most popular posts are below (Google Analytics suggests that the numbers are higher, in fact I'm not entirely sure how to marry up the disparity in figures between Blogger Analytics and Google Analytics (remembering that Blogger is owned by Google)) with their pageviews.

24 Oct 2010, 7 comments
8,684 Pageviews
5 Jun 2010, 3 comments
8,575 Pageviews
24 Jul 2009, 8 comments
7,716 Pageviews
11 Apr 2010, 4 comments
4,114 Pageviews
30 May 2011, 5 comments
3,992 Pageviews

Ironically I stopped promoting "How to find old tweets" (because it's out of date and superseded by "A list of tools..." however an awful lot of people seem to be searching in Google for that and so that's the one that brings them to the blog. See my earlier point on tagging.

1 comment:

  1. Also I should highlight that some of the popular posts are also listed on the front page (and all pages of the blog) as being "Useful posts" - I've not tried altering these to see if it makes a difference. Largely because the posts I've posted there are actually quite useful ;)

    ReplyDelete

Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.

Comments written in ALL CAPS LOCK will be deleted and I won't publish any pro-homeopathy comments, that ship has sailed I'm afraid (it's nonsense).