I'm still wrapping my head around this number!

I’ve been blogging somewhat regularly for over two years now and I’ve seen some growth in my followers, but it’s been slow going. Sure there have been spikes in pageviews when I’ve written on something controversial, but I haven’t seen a lot of people stick around beyond those posts. I’ve tried to practice good SEO and I’ve consistently plugged my blog on Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon, but even with the shout outs from other people on those social media outlets, I haven’t seen a lot of return visits. Maybe it’s because I am not focused enough. I write on just about anything because that’s who I am. If that’s why my readership looks like a roller coaster, that’s fine with me. I know that everyone has certain topics they are interested in and others that they couldn’t care less about.

What got me on this topic today is the recent spike I had in readers. On May 12, my post on leadership traits brought in 20% of my visits from the past year and 30% of my visits since the beginning of 2011 (stats via Google analytics).

My Google graph isn't quite as pretty anymore...

I figured “Leadership Traits” would be an awesome SEO title, and I thought I might get a dozen or so organic hits (via search engines) from it. Apparently I was wrong. Looking at my stats, not one of my visitors got to my site via search engines that day. What I was most surprised by was the number of direct visits to the site. As you can see, StumbleUpon was my greatest asset. Tagging your posts properly when adding them to StumbleUpon can be just as important as good SEO titles. A good StumbleUpon tag might even send you more traffic in a day than a good SEO title ever could.

Over 900 hits from StumbleUpon!!!

Although my SEO practices may not have paid off yet on that post, I don’t underestimate the power of good SEO titles. My post on setting up your Gravatar continues to bring traffic in every day. It’s a good evergreen post as John Saddington would put it on TentBlogger.com. I think “Leadership Traits” will eventually become an evergreen post as well, but only time will tell. As you can see, it took almost a month for my Gravatar post to start pulling in organic traffic.

Stats on my Gravatar Post

As a side note, I did finally get someone from Wyoming to check out the site on May 12. There were actually viewers from all 50 state and Washington DC as well as people in 42 different countries that checked out the site that day. Now if I only understood how to keep them coming back.

50 States + DC + (not set) = 52 regions

I've gone gloabal!