I thought I would give an update on how it is going with the blog. I know this is far over mid-year as we are in September, but I felt like it would be a good time. January this year I made an update on how my blog was performing in 2021 and I will provide some fresh numbers to see the growth and how close I am to some of the goals.
Number of new posts
Last year I wrote 50 new blog posts, this year I am targeting 100. I am currently at 70 so the progress is good but it should have been at 74 by tomorrow. I have almost 4 whole months left so there is a lot of time left to get this done. Next year I will likely go back to writing 50 blog posts as a 100 seems to hurt the quality of my content as I write shorter posts, then again I do like the challenge!
Number of visits
Last year I had 99.837 visits. By "visits" I mean traffic coming from organic + referral + social, as I do not count direct traffic. So far this year I have had 123.165 visitors, so it seems like it will be close to double at the end of the year but not quite. One of the reasons is my traffic got hit quite hard in late February this year:
My best guess is that this was a google search engine update as 80% of my traffic is from Google search. There is not much else to explain the sudden drop and normally my site is quite stable. As you will notice in the above it goes up and down quite a bit but that is due to the weekends.
My weekly average visit count is 3.519 (123.165 / 35) which is around 500 visitors per day on average, of all of 2021 that number was around 275 - so almost a double. I do see a lot of weeks with 4.200-4.400 visits, so it will likely rise for the rest of the year.
Writing a lot of new content has not increased my amount of visitors as much as I thought it would, I think next year will be about heightening the quality of what I have instead.
Some statistics
As always most of my users are using a computer to view my site:
And still Chrome and Edge are the most dominant browsers:
As this is a personal blog it does not really have "a single niche". Instead I write about whatever I want but usually it is on the topic of Software Development and around C#, Javascript or Web. Therefore most of my users are at work coding when they visit my site and therefore at a computer.
Final thoughts and going forward
One goal of my blog has been met and that is to reach 100.000 visitors in a year. Next is 1 million in a year or 100.000 in a month :)
I have started to use Ezoic and I am familiarising myself with the tools they have. I have put some ads on the website, but it is nowhere near worth my time blogging VS taking on more hours as a Software Developer. Then again, this is a personal blog for fun and if nothing else Ezoic revenue might pay my hosting expenses!
I am wondering what the Google Helpful Content update will do to my site. So far it is a little down but that might also be due to Labour day tomorrow. I hope I can avoid a drop like back in February!
I will write 30 more posts this year and then we will see where that brings me for next year traffic wise. Thanks to everyone reading, I hope it is worth your time!