Well it’s time once more to do the old “chart the traffic” routine. Not a lot to say, but in the interests of continuity, here it is.

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 795,166 (up from 780,780)
Google PR: 2 (up from 0!) I just noticed this today!
Technorati Authority: 9 (up from 8), Fans 1
RSS Subscribers: 11 (up from 6)

The Golden Rule
July 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 835 (last month I had 876)
Pageviews: 1059 (1.27 per visit)

Inbound Links
I’m now using the tool found at MarketLeap.com which seems to give fairly reliable results.

Google: 3
Yahoo: 485 (spread across jonathanboettcher.com and www.jonathanboettcher.com)

Conclusions
Traffic dropped just slightly from last month, though it is fairly constant lately. I was pleased to see a jump from 0 to 2 on the PageRank - I’ve been waiting to see something happen on that front for quite a few months now, and it is nice to see a return. I’m still not sure exactly what that means in terms of rankings - is it something that helps, or is it just an indicator of where you’re already at?

In general I haven’t been putting much effort into this blog during the summer, with only the odd posts here and there. However, I am planning on attending the Affiliate Incubator seminar in September, so plan on reading lots about that on here. Hopefully I can start attracting more of the people interested in affiliate marketing instead of in my laptop ;). Hey, for now, its still traffic and I’ll take it. Every now and then I make 10 cents in advertising off it, so whatever.

Well I just realized it is halfway through July and I still haven’t written my little traffic charting post. I’ve been somewhat neglecting this blog lately, (this is the first time I’ve used that time-honored phrase on this blog) so I’m not sure what we’re going to learn from this post. Nevertheless, here goes.

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 780,780 (up from 1,291,056)
Google PR: unranked (I heard somewhere PR gets updated quarterly????)
Technorati Authority: 8 (up from 6)
RSS Subscribers: 6 (down from

The Golden Rule
April 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 876 (last month I had 353)

Inbound Link
I’m now using the tool found at MarketLeap.com which seems to give fairly reliable results.

Google: 6
Yahoo: 372 (spread across jonathanboettcher.com and www.jonathanboettcher.com)

In a different post I talked about my difficulties with having some links coming in on www. and some without. I think I’ve straightened that one out, but it is taking a while for the search engines to correct. I also had about a million absolutely useless links showing in Yahoo, hundreds of them coming from the same two blogs, and I couldn’t even find my link on their page! Some wierd bug in their template I suspect.

Conclusions
Anyways, as you can see, my traffic is generally improving. However, if  you look at the webmaster tools and search results, you see a more full picture. Fact is, probably 90% of my traffic is coming for and leaving on a certain post I did about my Dell XPS 1530 laptop a while back. I had no idea it would be so popular, but it has been drawing a steady 20-30 visitors per day for a few months now. If only some of them would click on an ad or two then we’d be getting somewhere.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m still going to keep on plugging away here. I think the trick to getting some good traffic is to get a few posts out there that are really hot. Once you start getting some traffic flowing you get a better opportunity to attract those regular readers.

Well it’s time for my monthly traffic post, in the ongoing spirit of trying to grow this blog and chart its  growth. (See last month here)

Here goes:

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 3,559,160 (up from 6,181,254)
Google PR: unranked
Technorati Authority: 5
RSS Subscribers: 0

The Golden Rule
April 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 297 (last month I had 143)

Inbound Links
During April I did the 30 Minute Backlinks exercises and boosted my links way up from a hundred or so to over 700, in only a week or so. Now for some reason, everything I try using to measure my inbound links comes back with a 0. I know that isn’t possible, and I’ve tried measuring it manually on Yahoo, so I don’t know what is going on with the applications I’m using.

Woopra
I just got Woopra installed so I’ll be using that for my stats from now on, although I’ll continue to keep Google running as a double check.

Conclusions
My Alexa rank is steadily improving, which is nice to see, though I don’t know how useful it is. I’m still not getting much regular traffic. Most trickles in from comments I leave elsewhere, with the majority coming from a few heavy days with StumbleUpon traffic. I’d like to see my inbound links straightened out, and I wonder when Google PR starts kicking in? Still, overall I got double the visitors this month from last, so that’s good progress.

I posted on March 20th that I would start tracking my traffic on this blog, as a means of measuring my success at driving free traffic here. Anyways, here are the stats - either for the month of March or as of today, April 3. Please note that I only got Analytics happening around this time, and I didn’t do any promotion prior to this.

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 6,181,254 (up from 13,952,743!)
Google PR: 0
Technorati Authority: 0
RSS Subscribers: 0

The Golden Rule
March 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 143 (last month I had 1!)

Inbound Links
Another metric I’m going to start tracking is inbound links. I’ll assume that I had 0 at the beginning of March, and as I didn’t measure this at the end of March I’ll assume I had about 30 on March 31. I recently started a new tactic which is going to greatly increase my inbound links (Apr 4 - Yahoo:113, Google:0, MSN:0) which I’ll post about soon. I’m using the link popularity tool at SEOChat.com.

By far the greatest part of my visitors (approx 110) came from one comment I made on Digg one day where I also included the link to my blog. I actually made $1.22 on Adsense that day (from this site). So a few more days like that and I’ll have recovered my costs on the domain anyways. LOL. Good thing I’ve got other things to rely on!

The rest of the visitors mostly came from other sites where I’ve been posting comments, getting involved in the community. This is a slow way of developing traffic, but hopefully it will prove to be higher quality, in terms of finding people that will come and read more than one post, hopefully find something of value here and leave a comment or something.

I’m going to start tracking my progress in ranking for certain terms. This site happens to be #5 on Google for “Jonathan Boettcher” which by most measures is a completely useless term at the moment, so I’ve decided to pick “Affiliate Marketing Tips” as my target phrase for April. I don’t rank at all on any of the engines for this phrase so we’ll see how quickly I can get registered. Initially I thought of “internet marketing” but this is too broad a keyword and there is too much competition for that. Mind you, there will be good competition for this keyword as well, however it is a bit more “niche” so we’ll give that a shot. In addition, I’m planning on putting up some more resources directed towards affiliate marketing in particular.

In other news, last night I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, which went well, and I am excited about some of the new features that are available. Apparently you can get a live traffic chart on your admin panel now. Then all I have to do is get some more traffic!

Until next month…