Goal: 1 million page views
Duncan Riley> I’ve written in the past about the importance of setting goals, but after just having a flick through my stats I’m going to indulge myself a little bit because my next major goal is finally in site: 1 million page views in a month.
Now before everyone starts saying “what does this actually mean” it does include RSS feeds but doesn’t include spider traffic (if we included spider traffic the figure would be 1.5 million page views). The stats are derived from Awstats.
Stats are a funny thing really, we live and die by them in some ways because traffic counts, but looking back over the last years worth of stats, despite some one off spikes (Hurricane Katrina saw a big spike) the growth has been steady over time. For example in June 2005 I had 34561 unique visitors, 108614 visits and 441296 page views. The months following all trended upwards, with the exception of October which was down due to the various server difficulties I had that month. November reads, to 10 November at 10:15am, (including stats from my old server and new server) 21,513 uniques, 59046 visits and 347701 page views… times that by 3 and we get to 1 million page views in a month.
So there’s my little bit of self-indulgent happiness, that all things being equal I’ve hit another milestone. Next target will be 1 million visitors in a month.
What’s your blog-traffic target? Share and if you haven’t got one, its time to give it a thought, because if you don’t know where you want to go you may never get there.
the question, Duncan, is how did you get that growth?
BH is a great site, but (from what I have seen) there isn’t much original content, just news reporting
how did you manage to gain that traffic?
also it would be interesting if you could plot the stats of this site from birth until prsent on a graph
True, there is a lot of reporting, but there is also a fair mix of original content as well (guides, commentary etc…) and to be honest its the original content that drives traffic, and the general news stuff is just a compliment to that. I’ve been flat out lately which is why there hasn’t been as much original content, and also its getting harder to write things about blogging that I haven’t written before.
Why the traffic? well I suppose time helps, I started back in May 2003 so there is a lot of links, and a lot of Google Traffic as well (about 40,000 page views from Google a month, roughly). You need a mix of content, and I suppose more importantly regular content to keep visitors and build new traffic.
I’ll take a look at some of my historical stats, given I’ve had this site hosted on 5 different hosts now its not as easy as it seems :-)
Our traffic goals are:
– 100 visitors,
– 1.000,
– 10.000,
– 1.000.000 (June-July 2006, It’s World Cup time).
;-)
“and to be honest its the original content that drives traffic, and the general news stuff is just a compliment to that”
I dunno, it’s like – the opposite for me – I appreciate getting the ‘reposts’ of press releases and other news, and the original stuff is the bonus for me… I do get a lot of heads-up type of news and stories that I would otherwise have to subscribe to many different to get .. I know! I’ve been streamlining my bloglines
Unless I’m totally whacked. That’s what I feel I’m doing on my PetLvr.com blog .. posting other people’s tips and pet related articles and suggestions. I try to compliment those with my own stories or pictures or just links to stuff versus other way around.
Some people like shopping in malls, than go around to all the specialty stores…
Hart
that’s true to some extent, because I try to be the first in the blogosphere with a lot of the msm/ media release stuff as well, but in terms of traffic the original content is the winner by itself, but as I said its the other stuff that sustains it as well, and there are times where I’ll track down a msm story that will bring in good traffic as well
Thanks for the challenge. I need to set goals for this next year, and I’ll include them in my resolution post I’ll do in December. I just passed 100,000 visitors, a number I NEVER thought I could hit, so now the sky is the limit! ;-)
thanks for sharing this duncan. very inspiring. my goal is similar: to hit 1 million page views per month by the end of 2006. and i have a long way to go. can you even remember when you were getting only 15k page views per month?
best – michael
I think that with the right mix of high-quality content, solid design and savvy marketing efforts, just about any blog can achieve 1,000 daily page views within two months of its first post. Often, blogs can reach a turning point where their traffic starts growing faster and faster over time. Of course there’s an eventual limit, but I think it just takes sound business sense and hard work to make a blog popular. 1 million is big number … I wish you success in reaching it, Duncan!