A discussion about the software industry and their coders

I started the BizOfCoding on March 10, 2006. Today, April 3, I hit an important blogging milestone -- 1000 page views in less than 4 weeks! 24 days to be exact.

I am a strong believer in the value and power of blogging and in the rise of the blogosphere as a one of the most important benefits of Web 2.0. Therefore, about thrice a month, I will chronicle the directions and other useful statistics of my blog for the benefit of new bloggers. When I re-started blogging at WordPress (after a long break from Blogger and my first post on it, The Origin of a Brand over 2 years ago) I could not find useful numbers to understand trends for individual blogs. I realized that perhaps no one had captured this information for new comers to the blogosphere. I am a Marketing man. I not only look for the creative and visionary aspects of marketing, branding and strategy but also like to know the math side -- the numbers and statistics that help crystallize creative ideas and visions. Blog numbers and traffic data are important because they help to guide and motivate a new blogger. A blogger should have the information to adapt his future posts after evaluating the response to his/her blog .

One problem a new blogger faces is that popular free blogging services like WordPress and Blogger don't bundle comprehensive sitemeters -- from the start. These, however would help a blogger analyze traffic and key numbers related with his/her blog. WordPress for example does give some limited stats once you log into your account. Blogger puts sitemeter related information in the Help section for advanced use > Add-Ons. I also found that my (free) WordPress blog Tech Strategist took a fairly long time to get indexed by Yahoo's and Google's search engines as compared to my KMM blog. (In retrospect I think I should have also recorded this time lag. If someone has it please share.)

Overall, if you believe you (1) are fairly new to the blogosphere, (2) have good writing skills and (3) useful ideas/thoughts to share -- I would recommend joining a blog network like KMM rather than going to a free blogging site that has limited features. Unless you are an experienced blogger trying with an established readership -- to monetize your blog -- I would not recommend paying for hosting your blog on a full-featured site/server. Blog Networks like KMM bring valuable experience and blogosphere know-how to you and your blog. This will reduce your learning time in becoming a better blogger.

So here are three useful stats from my blog:

1. 0-1000 page views: 24 days (the last 1 week logged over 450 page views which displays the network effect of a blog becoming more useful after some people start reading it and spread it by word of mouth.  The other factor for increased page views (as I learned from my blog) are:
   • the number of posts
   • posts on diverse topics
   • traffic from search engines
   • traffic from your blog network
   • your sharing the blog link to your friends who would be interested.
2. 0-355 visits: 24 days (the last 1 week recorded over 150 visits. please read my notes above.)
3. 3.1 average page-views per visit (this would increase has you post more useful information and diverse information on your blog)

In the coming days I will regularly post info about traffic from search engines like Google Search, Google Blog Search etc to my blog so you can understand trends and stats and hopefully use them to your benefit.

Please share (through comments or links to this post) any other useful observations from your own blogging experience -- especially if you are a new blogger. And yes, Happy Blogging! :)