So that I do not bore everyone with mindless statistics on a too regular basis, here is the bi-monthly round up of my traffic since this website started in the middle of February. This article covers website traffic for May and June.

I intended to post information at the end of May, but as I did not change my strategy in May from what I was doing in March and April, i.e. write content, talk one-on-one about this website with people, and share the occasional link through a social bookmarking website, I did not feel that any great insight would be gleaned from just a few updated numbers.

I now have traffic data for four complete months, ignoring the two weeks in February when the website was live but had very little audience. With four months of data I have the ability to sketch out a real graph and begin to draw some inferences from it.

I wrote back at the end of April that each month’s traffic had grown by 300%, well it is very easy to grow by 300%, month on month, when you only have a few dozen visitors to your page per sample period. Now that the website is becoming a little more established, I expect the growth rate to actually slow down if the growth rules of this website work like every other commercial website my company has ever created for clients.

There has been a steady month on month increase in traffic, both due to some small marketing efforts through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and the major social bookmarking websites.

There has also been the steady flow of traffic from search engines, many of the search terms are the standard affair.

In the web server logs there are the usual personal development searches, along with an increase of searches for "treadmill desks," "sensecam" and "World of Warcraft."

The number of people searching specifically for “Microsoft word draft mode” or "Microsoft word get rid of green and red squiggles" surprises me too. Perhaps Microsoft need to make that a knowledgebase topic because there appear to be a lot of people looking for the solution.

Looking at the traffic statistics of both StatPress and Webalizer, the growth is around 30% for the past two months. By the 21st or 22nd of each month I have surpassed the previous month’s visitors and page views.

I have had a few anomalous spikes in my traffic, which after analysis I was able to account for and remove from the traffic log. Sometime around the 15th of June a number of Made-for-AdSense (MFA) websites started using a modified WordPress plug-in called "Related Websites" which can perform a keyword search of your blog articles and link to related WordPress blogs within the network.

I had heard “good things” about Related Websites and thought I would give the plug-in a shot, using it to show related pages within my own blog that were pertinent to the article being read. Prior to switching to Related Websites, I was using Yet-Another-Related-Posts-Plug-in (YARPP) and wanted to experiment with different options whilst my traffic numbers are still reasonably low. Low traffic, lots of experimentation, not too much disruption to my readers.

I had started to see pollution of inbound and outbound spam links for close to two months, and they were just a minor annoyance at first, but as the month of June proceeded I began receiving more and more spam links, both coming to and linking out from this blog.

Unfortunately there is always a few complete assholes in any group who completely screw it up for everybody else. The owners and operators of MFA blogs, which are on the rise within the Related Websites network, are those assholes this time.

Unfortunately, just disabling the "related websites" part of the Related Websites plug-in, and making use of the "related pages" to show relevant pages within my own blog, keeps the website within the Related Websites network and hence, sending and receiving traffic from the spam blogs.

I would not mind the inbound traffic so much, but if your posts contain images, the Related Websites plug-in displays that image on the spam blog. This hit counts in your tracking statistics, consumes your bandwidth (no different to image leeching), pollutes your referrer log, and a bunch of other administrative nonsense I do not have the personal bandwidth for, taking time away from more important things.

I would like for legitimate blogs to get the image attached to the article in the excerpt being displayed, so I cannot really turn on the leech protect functionality in the web server control panel, but prevent the spam and MFA blogs from receiving the images. Right now, I don’t see any viable way of achieving this.

Once I cleaned out my statistics-tracking database and blocked the spam blogs using the web server software, the traffic began to settle down again to normal levels. Yes, it was great seeing all those “unique visitors” coming to my blog, but they were not. The hits were just false web traffic skewing my results. So out goes the Related Websites plug-in and I return to YARPP (for now).

When I wrote out the traffic statistics for the month of April, I made a mistake due to a bug in StatsPressCN that misreports data at the end of the day due to some issues with time zones. I fixed the numbers in that blog entry shortly after posting it but it is also a “feature” I need to be aware of in the future.

A friend asked me, shortly after I posted my website traffic update at the end of April, whether this website is going to be monetized heavily? And also, do I feel the usage of Google AdSense is somehow devaluing what I have to say?

The reality and intention is that I do intend to make money from this website, but mostly in indirect ways; selling services for my company, for my coaching and consulting, for products my company creates, and so on. So yes, there will be monetization in that regard. But, I also do not feel that Google AdSense, or any other advertising programme, that I run on this website will devalue it. It comes down to carefully monitoring what advertisements appear on this website.

Out of all of the websites I have been involved with creating and promoting, and there have been many, I have not run and marketed a purely personal website that is advertising supported before, so for me this is a good learning experience. I cannot very well attempt to educate clients with regard to how they can create revenue through advertising, sponsorship or affiliate sales, if I myself have not done it too.

I have never liked to bullshit clients on what they should or should not do, based purely on something I have read about or watched others do. If I have no direct experience with the subject matter myself, I have no business telling you your business. I laugh loudly, maniacally and most definitely disparagingly at much of the "self-help/self-improvement" industry, marketing and PR firms, and internet "gurus" telling you how to make money.

Much of what gets published by “people in the know” is regurgitated garbage they have read about, but never actually done. There are very few authentic people out there doing this stuff for real, and you can generally count the best on one hand.

You cannot be a criminal mastermind, or any kind of mastermind, if you take the well intentioned advice of people who have not been there and done that themselves. I am constantly asking of would-be advisors and well-intentioned people "from what authority do you speak?"

Face it, would you take advice on how to run a marathon from a 300lb couch potato who had never moved very far from their games console in their entire life?

Here are my traffic statistics for the period March 1^st to July 1^st.

Even though the month column shows the date as the beginning of the month, the statistics for each month are actually from the end of the month. I have yet to figure out how to make Google Docs spreadsheet just show the month and year in the formatting.

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Well this has been a fun week of technology shenanigans, I must say.

Have you noticed that this website has been devoid of new posts for the past two or three weeks?

Did you notice that I only create 10 new posts in July and not my self-imposed requirement of 20?

No?

Oh well, I noticed!

The past few weeks I have been busy with business projects, personal projects, a week long family visit, and a wonderful viral infection that knocked me six ways from Sunday. I also got to visit Legoland California. And nobody was supposed to notice because WordPress had posts queued up and ready to go.

Only they did not.

The posts, I mean.

Seems that the scheduled posts somehow disappeared completely in to the ether without ever showing up. I know that the articles were uploaded from my laptop to the server. I verified each post looked correct in the browser by previewing it. And then I quietly went away to enjoy myself.

And so did WordPress.

Or the database.

Or the server.

Or something.

The only thing I can think of is somehow the hard drive on the web server had an issue and was rolled back to an earlier backup. Either way, my scheduled posts went amiss and I will be re-uploading them once I return to a location with adequate bandwidth.

I blame myself for this little fiasco. I did not build in to my goals for this website any self-imposed rule to check that the server is up and running on a daily basis, with scheduled posts going live at the appointed times.

Of course, I did check more often than I care to recount when the site was first created and new and fresh and exciting to ensure that I had everything configured correctly.

But once I was reasonably confident that everything was running fine, I let the technological side of things take a back seat whilst I got on with the act of writing and content creation. I even wrote a script that pinged my cell phone cum SenseCam to alert me if the web server ever went off-line for more than an hour and send me a daily SMS of traffic statistics. And that worked just perfectly. I just did not account for WordPress, or the database, or that mystical something, throwing the proverbial monkey wrench in to the works, where everything appeared to be working fine, but actually was not.

I took my eye off the ball for a couple of weeks and technology screwed me.

Same old story.

But now that I am aware of the problem, I have a small personal quandary. Do I back-date the missing posts, filling in the blanks as it were? Or do I just put them up as new posts for this month?

Okay, back to the normally “scheduled” article writing. Thanks for understanding and letting me take this “unscheduled” break.

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