Metagain

Meta...again
I thought it was time for another meta blog post. There's only a few days left of December and with this post I am back on track for the one post per day goal. I admit some posts were shallower than others, but all together I do think it is a nice display of my current capabilities as a Blogger (leaving open whether these capabilities are any good). Let's look at how the Blog is doing.

Visitors
Woot, my site gets visitors! The transition from a total flatliner to getting-some-hits is very cool. I also have to admit that some promotional tweaking does help, at least in this phase. A few backlinks in other blogs (mostly comments I made myself I have to admit) and a niche subject that started to generate some hits did help a lot. Last two weeks I'm at +/- 15 visitors a day (multiple page hits per visit though), 20% are returning visitors: thanks! Really! Thank you! :-D

Tools / statistics
I have three tools I commonly use: Google Statistics, Blogger Statistics and Google Webmaster Tools. They all have their pros and cons. Blogger's statistics are real time, the other two are lag 1 or 2 days behind. I  only recently discovered the cool things that Google's Webmaster Tools offers. Some features only become interesting when there's enough data available. One that works (for me) nicely at the moment involves Google's searches.

Pingywebedition
Apparently Google keeps track of every search, including the pages that were returned, their position, and which hits are actually clicked on. The only search query I see info for is pingywebedition. Although the amount of searches per day are around 50 (very low!), I have a CTR (Click Trough Rate, the percentage of times that my page is actually clicked when it is displayed) of 20% (this has been rising the last few weeks). This gives my roughly 10 visitors a day (each hitting perhaps a number of pages). Although these numbers are soooo low and insignificant in any way, it nicely shows how 'being big in a niche' can be better than 'being small in huge topic'.

New hits
Today I noticed I'm also being found once in a while now in searches for the Harmony Remote 650. Maybe this is coincidence, maybe some other factors play a role here that I do not fully understand (yet)! Don't tell, but I tried to push that a little more today by posting my review at a few other (relevant) blogposts. It is micromanagement, I know, and it is only worth the effort because of the learning experience. And the rush of rising graph's :-D

Next?
What's next? I had another idea today: start a new blog each month, niches this time, stopping what doesn't work or isn't fun to do, and use this blog as a meta blog about the whole process. That way, this blog would also get some focus (and less-than-a-blogpost-a-day). Haha, this is so me, not wanting to choose, even when I have to pick a niche, I think about picking 12 :-D Will let you know how this evolves!