Learning in the Corporate World

This blog has been re-titled OMG – I am blown away!

Since commencing the 31 Days to a Better Blog Chocolate challenge, I have indeed seen an increased traffic load on my site.  I have been using Site Meter pretty much since setting up my blog – traffic to say the least has been minimal LOL and not surprisingly reporting well, not a hell of a lot!  My stats have now gone up from 0-1 hits a day (I suspect the 1 hit a day was from me at work lol) to an average of 26, while not reaching the lofty heights of Sue or Frances, I am still pretty stoked about this.

Sue noticed that I had gotten to the top of the Edublogs site for traffic the other day and she wanted to know what sort of hits I was getting.  Sitemeter was showing 0 [long story, will come to that in a minute!]  hits.  Sue had me install Google Analytics into my blog [which I subsequently broke and Edublogs guru James had to fix for me].

It is a wicked up – but sucks a bit in that it only reports on the data daily [I was so exicted there for a while, once I fixed sitemeter, was in continual refresh mode, even though it updates hourly].  On the other hand, there is a serious amount of data to be found in there.

Darren from Problogger suggests that we look at the following when analysing our data:

• Our most popular posts
• Referral Statistics
• Bounce Rate
• and a couple of other things I don’t really have enough data on yet!

So I have spent some time this afternoon faffing around inside Sitemeter to see what sort of information I could really get from it and all I have to say straight up is  OMG – I am blown away.

I thought I would start by investigating the direct traffic.  Well this looks simple enough on the surface.  My initial impressions though that the referring sites were most likely from Sue, Frances and other choc challenge people et al, and maybe the front of Edublogs.  Boy was I wrong and again OMG – I am blown away! When I drilled in an looked at the referral sites report I noticed 2 things (1)

The map overlay was heavily concentrated with traffic from the USA and Canada. Weird (or so I thought at the time).  I looked at the content overview next and this is when I got REALLY excited, most of my pages view were of the post I had written giving my background context to EQ2.  This of course explains the traffic from North America, as a significant number of gamers are from this part of the world.

Wow – who would have thought?  Looks like I am going to have to pull my finger out of the proverbial and start posting! Will have to wait until I get back from holidays of course – although I have already written half of a few of them which is good!

So to conclude OMG – I am blown away!