Our blogs started in April '05 and had 3,479 visitors that month.
Traffic has been steadily increasing, and starting to plateau (at least for now). Feb '06 saw 17,482 visits. The highest month was Nov '05 with 21,374 visits. This is all of our blogs comined.
Walker Blog traffic - Apr '05-Feb '06
Popularity
Our most popular blog site is our Off Center blog. The most popular RSS subscription is our New Media RSS.
Offcenter is popular because it's a "catch all" blog. It's less specific and more general.
Specific blogs, like Visual Arts, are good, becuase they offer content to a specific audience. Even though the traffic is less than that of Offcenter, the content is specifically taylored to what the audience reading really wants. Quantity vs quality. Perhaps people reading a catch all blog will become interested in more taylored blog content, and vice versa. They work in tandem.
New Media has the highest RSS subscription rate, simply because the audience is the most familiar with the technology of RSS. As adoption of RSS grows, these numbers should even out.
Referrers
Blogs tend to link each other. Hot topics come and go quickly. If you get something linked from a rather popular blog, many other blogs will also link to you, because many blogs are simply links people find from other blogs.
Expect high spikes in traffic from time to time when this happens. Spikes last a few days, then subside. Hope you picked up a few new subscribers along the way!
Search Strings
What you write about, and how it gets indexed can affect traffic. Many search results are to blogs now. Some of the search terms used to find your blog may surprise you. Here are some recent popular ones for the Walker:
- museum blog
- mel chin
- blowjobs
- edward murrow video
- marcus pacheco tattoo
The third one in that list may be stunning, until you find this post on our ECP blog. Keep this in mind, there are many different ways for people to find your blog.
Increasing Blog Traffic
So how do you increase your blog traffic? While amusing search strings help, the best way is to get linked from other blogs. As stated, blogs are a sort of network of "what's happening now" online. Hot stories are picked up and disemminated throughout the "blogosphere". Get in this news stream and people will be linking to your site.
This is a different way to think about driving traffic. It's other people driving traffic for you, more than it is you driving your own traffic through the normal means (advertising, search results, etc).
How do you get linked? The most important thing is original content. Many blogs are simply an aggrigation of links to other sites. These are popular with people who want a fast list of places to go (pre-sorted to weed out the cruft), but it's also important to be one of the places people link to.
This is where the Walker does double duty. Off Center is more of a link-ish blog. It has some commentary but a lot of it is links elsewhere. Most of our other blogs are about the Walker itself, what we're doing, working on, and original content. These are the types of blogs being linked to from the big blog link farm sites.