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.
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