I was looking through the web stats for March and found a couple of things that surprised me.
First, when you look at the traffic to the main blog here, this is the split in traffic (by pageviews):
RSS - 45,826 (39.2%)
Main Index - 7,820 (6.7%)
Archives - 63,170 (54.1%)
The interesting thing here is that there are more pageviews of the archives than the current stuff. I have heard of a similar phenomenon on other blogs. Sites end up with alot of traffic from Google with people finding things directly in the archives.
I also thought this may be a function of spamming. We don't have many people using the search on the blog (230 requests). We also don't have an overwhelming amount of links coming in. Thoughts?
The second thing that was very interesting is that the Podcasts blog is more popular than the Excerpts Blog (24,417 vs. 18,209 pageviews). We have only been posting audio content regularly over the last six weeks, so it was surprising to see such a surge in popularity. It is clear people like the content and we will continue to support that.
So my question here is: Do you like the Excerpts Blog? Are there things we could do to make it better?
Posted by Todd S. at April 6, 2005 11:39 AM | TrackBackTodd, give us the option of downloading a PDF version of the excerpts. I find excerpts are easier to read in PDF form than in blog form.
Posted by: johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy) at April 6, 2005 01:17 PMI like the excerpts blog. And I would guess that the archive search is people looking for a particular book and stumbling upon your site through a search engine. I think an almost 40% RSS reader rate is great. (And, hopefully, after they visit the site, you convert a lot of the Google searches into faithful RSS readers.)
Posted by: Shawn Lea at April 7, 2005 10:33 AM