Small Potatoes – Traffic Update for March and April
Interested in my traffic stats? I wanted to write something about them sooner but it would have been a little pointless doing so at the end of March with only a single data point available to me. Now I have two data points I feel much more qualified to talk about how to operate a successful blog. 
The end of the 2nd full month, 200,000 words written since the first day, close to 100,000 words published live on the blog, and a growth rate in the triple digits. This blog had just a little over 440 unique visitors and 2,200+ page views, the spiders visited me 2,900 times and I have a total of 460 unique RSS subscribers. All of the traffic statistics have grown by 220% for both March and April, you can do the math to figure out how many people showed up in February. These numbers really are small potatoes today but it will be interesting to see how much levelling off in growth percentage occurs in the coming months. I am estimating a 20% month on month sustained growth rate after the first 6 months, let’s see how close I am to that prediction at the end of the year.
Right now, I only have two good data points so I can draw any line I like through them, so far it is impossible to infer anything from them or give any prognostications of future traffic without more data. I am just glad I am being paid for my writing by magazine editors and not this blog. 
Total amount of money made through Adsense so far is $7.10. That and another ten bucks will get me a pizza. My page CPM and CTR are reasonably good, and I do not see myself trying to optimize ad placement any time soon. The Google Adsense on the webpage at this time is just to get a feel for how the system works whilst the readership numbers are still low.
Indirect income from this blog has been good, it is providing a valuable platform for promoting my video game development company with enquiries from potential clients and also increasing the number of people that I coach in their personal development.
With regard to promotion I have done almost none for the past two months, people are finding me purely via a search or an occasional link on another website at this time. I do not intend to do any heavy marketing or promotion of this website until at least the six month mark when there is actually enough original content available to be of interest.
At the end of each month I will post a short update on how the website is growing (or not) and observations on what things I am doing to effect that growth.
See you next month.
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