Weekly report: 21st to 27th of August

Activities:

Yesterday, I created 3 goals for "Master the Web" to monitor the number of people that subscribe to the blog's feed, use any of the permalinks or any of the social networks. This was a bit awkward to setup because the URL paths on blogs are fairly short thus there aren't many steps to enter. My goals merely contain the end-point URL and the main site URLs.

Plus I am not too sure these goals are going to work (except the fact that possibly nobody will go for these goals) as the matching URL patterns are fairly complex and the doc scarce. I eventually found some documentation for the regular expression required to build these complex URL patterns (see Analytics regular expressions).

I also fixed my social networking URLs (that is for that blog, I need to move the fix to the other blogs). I had a few issues with Technorati, Digg and Blacklist URLs. I think the code I found was a bit dated. It works better now. That hopefully will become more useful when the site takes off.

From now on, I will attempt to submit to the social networks a post on a weekly basis in order to monitor their effect on the traffic and of course build it. This week I decided to submit the "Must have resources for wannabe webmasters" post from this blog. I submitted to the main social networks: Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Blinklist, Furl and Reddit.


Changes:

I had a big surprise this morning when I checked my Analytics results. "Master the web" approached the 200 visitors/day mark! I am very pleased. The day before I was at 34 and the day before at around 27. This follows my posting of "Must have resources for wannabe webmasters". A good part comes from Digg (Ah good all Digg always there when we need it!) but the surprise comes from Reddit. Over the last free days it accounts for 36.5% + 19.1% = 55.6% of the visitors (I posted on one Reddit sub site as well)! Digg accounts for just 10.65% and blogger.com 10.27%. No news from the other social networks.


Analysis:

Looking at my goals they appear to have completely failed. However, I went on FeedBurner and I do have 16 listeners (after just 2 days of signing for it). This indicates two things, my goals are badly setup and the contents is of enough value that some people subscribed to it (thanks guys). This is a good sign; I am on the right track.

I must say the overall number and the percentage of Reddit came to me as a big surprise. Don't go just for the obvious: Digg, Technorati, and Delicious. Although - as suggested in a previous post - the relevance of the contents is really key to success (my Flicker post had 3 diggs, 1 more than this last one, but brought far fewer visitors).

Reddit is clearly a very good source of referrals. There must be something wrong with the other ones, not a single referral seems odd to me.


Actions:

• I must look at these goals. This is not right,
• I will also look at renaming (for the last time ever promised) the photo blog and the tecky blog. I read that using shorter URL is advisable so that users can remember and type it back,
• I want to create a new tecky blog as well on a different line, the existing one is not picking up at all,
• I want to work on my Adobe Lightroom evaluation (possible weekly post to social network),
• Finally I hope to start building a list of the best advertisement and affiliate schemes.

That is it for today folks,

See you.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Google, SEO, search engine optimization, webmaster, blog, social networking, Digg, Technorati, Blinklist, Delicious, Reddit