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Varying Blog Traffic

I started a blog for work as an outlet to stay current with customers. Obviously with my 5 year blogging career, it wasn’t a huge learning curve. Actually it was 0. The information just changed from things I cared about to things other people care about. Rnningfool.com is me and information that comes out of my head. The work blog is about the products we are selling and other business related activity. The difference in performance is worth noting. *If you want to read the other blog just go to our company’s website (my last name.com) and find the blog icon on the home page.

Yesterday on my company blog post, I received 150 views. The blog has been up for 9 days. 150 isn’t a vast amount of traffic but if anyone has ever started a blog, you know it takes time to build an audience. Here are the stats from that site over its entire life:

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The bounce rate is fairly high but that should come down as the site improves with content. The blog started with a post on Facebook which shows the high traffic beginning. Notice the days leading up to the next big spike produce virtually no traffic. So why the sudden increase? I’ll explain after we view the stats for rnningfool.com. It took approximately 500 days to receive 150 views and the rise was steady.
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Getting Bl0g Traffic?

I find this interesting because different outlets are being used to get traffic and different material is being produced for a different clientele.  My blog started by only receiving direct traffic.  People who knew me would type rnningfool.com as a URL into their browser.  Google would send virtually no traffic to the site.  After a year of blogging, Google starts sending some traffic for various posts and I believe it was a Suri Cruise picture that produced this traffic to hit 150.  A Relatively high bounce rate exists and remember that the majority of the traffic is Google landing someone on a picture which means the person doesn’t really want to go to rnningfool, they want to see the picture.

increase-blog-trafficThe company receives traffic in an entirely different manner.  The days leading up to the spike receive almost 0 traffic.  This is because Google isn’t sending anyone to the page and no one knows it even exists because the blog has been up for under 10 days.  However, when I make a post, I post the blog URL on our company Facebook page which has 800+ followers.  This in itself will not produce 150 visitors but people within the industry actually LIKE the post.  When someone likes the post, it gets shared with their entire friend base and the snowball begins.  0 traffic from Google, 100% of the traffic from Facebook.

the-free-thinker-jimmy-ovadiaWhen I post my URL on my  personal Facebook page, it rarely would get more than 3 likes.  This is actually the biggest question mark of this post.  Why does no one care about what I post personally?  Yet when I post an industry specific post on merely some nice pictures of sheet metal projects, people go apeshit.  The answer is quite simple, in our industry, there are less than a dozen people who know how to maintain an interesting blog, possibly less.  Yet there are thousands of people who write about whatever they want like the ordinary rnningfool.  The moral of the story, select projects that few people are doing and do them well.