2012 was the first full calendar year for ExtranetEvolution on WordPress, and I have just been looking at my annual statistics from Google Analytics, and comparing the year’s traffic with that of 2011 (post). During the year, the blog delivered 82,936 page impressions (up over a third on the near-60k recorded in 2011), generated from 25,608 unique visitors (up from 23,746).
Peak day was 16 October, when I wrote about Aconex appointing a new US general manager and BuildQatarLive, though it is likely the spike was also partly stimulated by attention to 15 October posts on Newforma and Nexadyne.
As a blogger on narrow range of niche topics (SaaS collaboration, BIM, etc), this blog will never become a high-traffic site, but it has many hundreds of loyal readers (a third of traffic is from returning visitors) around the world. The top six countries were UK, US and Australia, India, Canada and Germany, and the top cities London, Melbourne and Sydney.
Impressive statistics. Do you know for new visitors where the traffic was derived from? Was it search engine (and if so which one is the most effective), Twitter, LinkedIn or by other routes? How much interaction do you get by way of comments or direct email traffic?
Delving down into the sources, I think I can see the benefits of LinkedIn’s new interface. My blog posts are now shared through my LI status updates, and it appears the frequency of sharing these has increased over the year.
I get a steady stream of constructive comments on blog posts (excluding the comment spam – Akismet filters out 100s of those), most of which I approve, and I also get direct emails, occasional tweets and even telephone calls as a result of things I’ve blogged about. For example, last week, I talked with someone in a software start-up about launching their new business, and yesterday had a chat about BIM with someone who’d been reading the blog.