Blog Milestones at Gomeler.com
12.18.07 - 11:36pm
It isn’t very often when I sit down and look over what I’ve accomplished in my life but I just had one of those experiences earlier today. I was told some unfortunate and potentially life changing news this morning after which I sort of had a moment where my life flashed before my eyes. I spent a little while this afternoon then listing all the things I had done in my life and realized I’d accomplished quite a bit but here I’d like to share one thing. People use various statistics to compare their success amongst each other and with blogging I’d have to say pageviews, RSS readership, posts, and comments are the numbers that really matter. Below is a listing of some of the various stats that I have available and what they mean to me.
Pageview
Since June of 2006 I’ve been keeping track of my stats with Mint. I currently have served up 273,155 total pages and 196,058 unique pages, quite impressive I’d have to say for a hobby that I really haven’t put much attention into. The pages I serve up per day seems to fluctuate greatly on whether or not I post an article, on days that I post I currently hit around 500 total pages a day with 375 unique views and the days I don’t post hit 500 pages and 325 uniques. Pageviews mean the most to me as they show that my information is getting out there even if it’s just scanned through and thrown away. Hoping I can boost this stat as I believe it is my current roadblock into attracting product reviews and increasing my revenue. Will accept all advice on this, never can have enough.
RSS Readership
This value never seems to fluctuate besides slowly drop over time. Perhaps it means I’m slowly losing dedicated readers or inactive RSS accounts are slowly being deactivated. I’ve seen this number jump incredibly in the past after particularly popular posts but otherwise it seems to hover around 165 to 170 users with 900-1000 circulation hits. I’d really love to see this number jump by an order of magnitude but I really don’t know what to do to attract more dedicated readers. The few readers that I do hear from I appreciate greatly, the thought that someone finds my information useful enough to subscribe to is motivation enough to keep writing.
Posts and Comments
Numbers mean nothing without discussion. Not including this post I have 267 posts with 1182 comments. I have a feeling though that a lot of those comments are spam/linkbacks and over this holiday break I’ll be sifting through them all. Either way I’d like to believe I have a healthy amount of discussion on this blog for the amount of traffic I have accumulated. I remember the days when I was pulling in 100 hits a day and had zero comments so seeing those comments really makes me happy as it goes to show that I write something worth discussing.
One last stat that isn’t often compared is the amount of revenue generated. I have currently pulled in $274 through Adsense, which I have been running since June 28th, 2006. This has been enough to pay for hosting and purchase a few things to review, the last check I received from Google partially paid for the MSI Neo2-FR motherboard I currently have on my testbench. I’m not going to lie, I’d like to see my revenue increase dramatically as I always have the desire to review more hardware but with Adsense it seems to fluctuate with the weather. Perhaps with this upcoming redesign I’ll be able to find a more stable source of income as there are a ton of new products out that I’d like to review.
At the end of the day numbers only mean as much as you value them and frankly they are only a small portion of this hobby turned business. I’ve really enjoyed the last 22 months blogging and so long as I can afford the hosting costs and have an Internet connection I believe I’ll continue doing this. Let’s hope that my dreams for this blog will come true, if it happens it’ll result in some really kick ass reviews going down. Thanks for reading guys, really appreciate it.
I’d be interested to hear what your take is on the new 8800 GTS’. The specs I’ve seen make it seem rather impressive considering the cost, but I’m not so sure.
I’ll actually be talking about that in my next article. Nvidia did an interesting thing when they launched this new line of “enthusiast” cards. The 8800GT and 512MB 8800GTS are phenomenal cards and when overclocked easily surpass 8800GTX and 8800 Ultra performance, which makes these cards a bargain. More on that in a few hours though!