You're looking at a screen shot of my Typepad stats page for this blog. As you may be aware, Typepad's stats are woefully lacking, but one thing I've always trusted them for is referring URLs. The platform seems to do a pretty good job of tracking those.
Notice where the traffic is coming from. (You can click the image to see a larger version...or I could just give you my login credentials and you could see them that way.) In this particular screen shot, it's largely from Facebook. There's a Twitter referral in there too, and a couple of Google searches.
If you were to follow these over the course of several days you'd notice that most of the traffic comes from social media sites - Facebook and Twitter for the most part - where I put links to these blog posts.
On some days most of the traffic seems to come from Stumbleupon. Google searches make up a reasonable percentage as well.
What I'm not seeing very often are links from other blogs. Back in my formative blogging days, the traffic trend seemed to follow this pattern: Nobody reading it...Google beginning to pick it up...some links from bloggers who had graciously included me in their blogrolls...more googling...bloggers including links to me in blog posts and so on. Now, the pattern seems to lean heavily toward social media, then Google, followed way behind by an occasional blog post or two.
Why the difference?
Could it be that times have changed? Is it that social media is now the vanguard? Perhaps this blog is just too new to be of much interest to other bloggers (or, maybe I don't have anything noteworthy to say...that could be it :->).
I do remember in the early days asking people to include me in blogrolls and I've not done that this time. I've also not used the Robin Good Top 55 directory, which I did the first time. However, now the list is well into the 200s, not simply 55.
One of the traffic-building tactics that worked pretty well the first time and which, now that I think about it, is working so-so now, is commenting on or trackbacking to other blogs. That's a good practice for anyone looking to build traffic. In fact, my friend Dave Taylor (who easily gets more than a million visitors to his AskDaveTaylor blog a month) says you should comment on other blogs at least two-to-one more than you post on your own. (It is all about engaging in the larger conversation you know.)
So, where do visitors to your site come from? Please feel free to share. Are you noticing a similar pattern as mine? Also, what traffic-building tips can you share? What's worked well for you in the past? What's not working so well? I'd really like to know... and so would my readers.
Interesting, Paul. My blog has a much different audience so my traffic is mostly from search engines. I have hyper-local real estate info that I have consciously targeted to certain keywords, knowing there was a lack of info out there on them. Unfortunately (or may fortunately, depending on how you look at it) my posts don't really appeal to my fb sphere who aren't looking for my kind of info. It is great that you are getting that traffic. But you do deserve it as you provide a lot of awesome info. Just like you did in another medium in 'Realty Blogging'. Thanks for all you've taught me!
Posted by: Lisa Sanderson | January 10, 2008 at 07:45 PM
Lisa, you've made my day. Thanks for that very nice comment. I truly appreciate it.
Posted by: Paul Chaney | January 11, 2008 at 01:18 AM
Hi Paul,
A number of those FB hits are from me, lol! Your audience, lenders and other vendors would be well advised to follow your lead and post to social networking sites to market to Realtors or others in their field of expertise. Brian Brady and I discuss this all of the time.
As a Realtor, the local consumer I am targeting is out there on the search engines or is in my local database. Like Lisa my blog is hyper-local and I strive to keep it that way. There are no social networking posts, posts about blogging, etc... on my local blog.
While the stumbled upon, FB, AR & Localism hits are nice I tend to feel that they can skew the actual reality of the results. I do so love to play with them and manipulate results just for fun though. The right manipulation can catapult a post to page one-several times over and capture a lot of traffic. Ok, so I spend way too much time on my puter, lol...
Several months ago I began to leave a footer on my AR consumer posts with links into my lead generation system on my Long Beach blog. The result of this has been amazing. Now the bulk of the hits coming from AR & Localism are going into the lead gen areas. This is a far better scenario for my business.
I check where the hits are coming from all of the time, both from referrers and from the search engines. It is critical to know what the consumer is searching for when producing a hyper-local blog.
The largest amount of consumer hits come in on local area posts. Community information and Market Reports do very well.
Hyper local blogs can be a bit boring, but that is why so many of us play on the social networking sites.
Posted by: Laurie Manny | January 12, 2008 at 05:27 AM
Laurie, you should become a consultant! You've got a lot of knowledge working for you.
Posted by: Paul Chaney | January 13, 2008 at 11:14 AM