Something completely out of character for me has happened: I went without checking my secondary stats for this site for over two weeks. What that means is that I didn’t check my Alexa rank, Technorati rank, nor my Feedburner stats for over two weeks now. For someone that usually checks them every day, sometimes twice a day (yes, I know most don’t update that often), that is definitely strange, and for me, there was a side effect to not checking these things: my posting level went down.

Sure, it was the holiday season and all, but it isn’t like I didn’t have Internet access. Not only that, but I had plenty to post about, and now after checking my stats, I see that the lack of posting has created a sharp dip downwards, making me feel a little like I have put myself behind the eight ball, and should spend a fair bit of time producing content over the coming days.

For me, how I am doing with a blog helps spur me into action. I want to see continuous growth, even if that growth is only one more unique visitor in a month, for me, that is a success.

So, for some people, moving away from checking their stats has been said to improve productivity by freeing up more time to write, but for me, and probably many others, not checking your stats can decrease your drive to produce, so don’t forget to look at how you are doing every once and a while, and remember that even one more person over a previous month is growth.

Originally posted on January 4, 2008 @ 5:54 pm

Yesterday, this blog was fortunate enough to get to the front page of Digg. Thankfully, I had everything all ready to go and the site weathered the minor Digg storm just fine.

The story was Understanding Search Engine Penalties, and it has received over 300 votes.

The traffic was pretty great, didn’t really receive many links or anything, the comments on Digg, were less than nice, and even some of the ones I received here were pretty negative.

All in all, it worked out nicely in my favour, and brought in enough traffic that eXtra for Every Publisher has in ten days beaten the previous high traffic month, December 2007, by over 6,000 unique visitors.

My traffic so far this month stands at:
Unique Visitors – 29,693
Page Views – 83,933

I am very happy, and I can’t wait to see if there are any reasonably long term effects from getting on the front page of Digg, and for once, not getting buried. Blogs, especially like this one, rarely see the front page of Digg, and so that definitely made me feel a little special.

A huge thanks to all the people that voted the story up, and enjoyed the article and Celebrity Cowboy for being so great and letting me analyze their site.

Originally posted on January 10, 2008 @ 8:17 pm