There is little doubt that statistics are the bread and butter for any blogger, practically all bloggers have an addiction to look at their statistics page on a daily basis to see the rise and fall of their blog readership. For many bloggers these stats are probably the closely guarded secrets and I too have been guilty for over stating the actual numbers quite a few times probably for the sake of ego-rights, I have decided to come out into the open and share my experience as a Pakistani blogger, so that others can see the progress, the numbers are not big, but I am proud to have each and every click. Secondly I strongly feel that the year 2007 will definitely see an improvement in the awareness of this blogging concept and maybe in one years time I can look back and see the changes that have happened, if in fact I was right or not shall be decided in 365 days from now to see it if citizen journalism is indeed a phenomenon or just a passing fad or the Internet surfing Pakistani population.
It has been over two years since I started to blog, the concept initially started by taking the tender steps of maintaining an online diary to slowly becoming a very active and fun hobby. The very first post was made on 6th July 2004 on the blogspot sub-domain orthodontist.blogspot.com since then for over ten months I remained confined to the blogspot arena until I felt the need to move away from the frequently-down and very-unresponsive blogger.com to embrace the open-source WordPress CMS system. I finally took the plunge on 11th April 2005 to live on this web space permanently. Without doubt I think it was a great move timed to perfection as it might have been quite a difficult task had I delayed the move after I developed a larger reader base.
Teeth Maestro @ Blogspot (http://orthodontist.blogspot.com)
While at blogspot I had handful of readers averaging around 15-20 page views daily which was naturally small but I remain grateful for those that did bother to come as it was enough to fuel the writer in me to continue writing, content with the simple fact, that at least ‘someone’ was reading all the garbage I spin out on this unknown blog by an unknown person.
As expected the move to my own domain definitely did have an impact on the transfer of the faithful readership but I was impressed to see it recover to the average within a month if not less, taking a look at the blogspot statistics one definitely sees that the traffic continued on pour into the old blog primarily driven by the search engines which continued to spider the old URL until January 2006 after which the incoming links plummeted to a very unnoticeable level, I can only assume it was around this time that the search-engines stopped rummaging through my site and eventually marked it as inactive.
Teeth Maestro @ (https://teeth.com.pk/blog)
The shift to teeth.com.pk/blog was on April 11th 2005 I was able to migrate all my posts from blogspot into WordPress without even a minor hiccup, the level of customization at wordpress was definitely far greater to what I was accustomed to at blogspot, and it was definitely far more interesting then the limited functions associated with the free service. As mentioned the traffic did initially take a hit but very soon friends around the blogosphere were kind enough to update their links and the faithful readers soon followed me to this new domain.
A look at the statistics will show that for six odd months the readership remained at a stagnant level until October where my activity for raising funds for the Earthquake victims leading to the creation of Help-Pakistan.com & including the launch of the Donate a Dollar for Pakistan campaign, the readership did take a definite improvement and later in February with help of Omer Alvie and myself we together created and launched Don’t Block the Blog really helped get the necessary attention in the global blogosphere and pushed my blog numbers to an impressive level.
Today the average readership hovers around 350 page-views & 25 returning visitors (30-day average) while the two year average is around 280 page-views with 17 returning visitors. A total of 189,000 page-views & 119,000 Unique Visitors, not to forget 161,000 spammers which try their best to beat the system but are caught & cleansed well before they land in my inbox.
RSS Feed Analysis
As we all know that in the last few years RSS feeds have definitely changed the ability to share information and for bloggers RSS feeds also give a good indicator as to how many people have them on the watch list. For Teeth Maestro’s blog there is a definite regular following with over 100+ subscribers keeping an eye on the activities of this blog via RSS feeds. It was somewhere in September of 2006 where the traffic on the RSS feeds simply sky rocketed, I have no idea what suddenly triggered this rise but I remain content to see the numbers steadily rise. Previously I had enabled full access to the entire content on the post, this generally meant that people read the entire post and did not need to come clicking through to the blog so to test the issue I reverted to summary feeds literally a week back. 
Sadly the test did not ride well with a few of my subscribers and I quickly went back to the old settings as I thought it was important for people to read my work, than actually have me worry about petty issues like how to drive traffic to the blog. You can subscribe to the full RSS feed here or alternatively have it delivered straight into your email box by subscribing to the email newsletter here
Technorati Ranking
The blogging community depends tremendously on incoming links, I generally monitor the Technorati ranking, which probably is a good engine to calculate all incoming links. Over the 2 years I have been fortunate to have some generous links throughout the community to have climbed upwards close to an overall technorati ranking of 12,000 when 175 odd sites were linking to Teeth Maestro. This was generally seen in the days following my efforts with Don’t Block the Blog but after 180 days technorati slowly purges these links and today I stand at a rank of 29,093, with 425 incoming links from 113 blogs. Check out my Technorati profile here
There is no doubt that each and every reader that chooses to come by my blog means a lot to me, quite a larger number remain lost as silent viewers, some take the time to interact and leave an odd comment. I have no egos pushing me to strive for bragging rights of the million odd visitors a year and I remain fully content with the traffic numbers you see here *knock on wood*. I sincerely hope to continue to keep this blog interesting so that readers can keep me bookmarked, that’s all I care for. A message for all those silent surfers and the anonymous feed readers, do take a moment to say hi, as it will truly mean a lot to me.
Comments
16 responses to “Teeth Maestro’s Blog Stats”
Hi!
😀
I’ve posted a couple of comments over the last few months so aren’t completely silent, but I do check you out several times per week. Keep it coming!
Heh… cheers Dr. Sahib.
I wouldn’t quite agree with that – I think last year I only looked at them a few times – after some time it just doesn’t mean anything.
Anyways, cheers and hope the visitor trends keeps increasing forever….
Nice one. Keep it up.
great. if only i could find out how many people visit my page daily :). that was one reason why i loved blogspot.
practically all bloggers have an addiction to look at their statistics page on a daily basis to see the rise and fall of their blog readership.
LOL! Yes i do check my stats daily:D the avg visit i get daily is millions time more than I expect because bloggin was like a hobby project for me, that’s other thing that I do take bloggin seriously now 🙂
Hey dr good idea. If somone writes then obviously has in mind readers. Blogging is not something like a monoluge…i agree with you that statistics are the bread and butter for any blogger…..
I’m impressed!
Have you tried ads in your RSS feed? And a friend had some great results in traffic increase when he started posting on a variety of different topics like some tv shows, elvis, etc.
Now now that’s an analysis – but yes I agree truly with you – apart from the stats that how many hits you are getting, the referrals and all that really matters too (though silently for many bloggers and emotionally too :)) …!
Nicio – keep going on high pace !
Asma – I think you are right I missed the section on incoming links – I generally keep an eye on Technorati which at present shows me with a Rank of 29,093 (425 links from 113 blogs)
But a few months back it was higher hovering around the ranking of 12,000 with 150 odd incoming links. The higher ranking was because of the Don’t Block the Blog campaign and slowly with time, after 180 days, technocrati purges the old data to refresh with a new ranking.
Thank you for catching this last part of the analysis and I feel this should be appended to the original post
Impressive, keep the good work up!!!
Interesting statistics. What are the spikes for around Feb 06 and Jun 06? Any idea?
I think more than the links, the 100+ feed subscribers you get is impressive. I hope to attain that one day! I have 6 so far! Woo hoo! I suppose one is bloggers.pk! but I love all 6!!
Yeah – I love my blog stats. Even though they are small as I am just starting out, but its great fun to look at them.
Also – there are 3 colors on the hits chart. Blue is unique, green is hits, what is the orange one at the bottom which we can barely see?
Omar, the first peak in Feb 06 was generally Don’t Block the Blog while the second 2000+ peak was a link to an image post by a chinese blog site, little good did it do as not one said hi and now I have even forgotten which post it was LOL
The third orange color is Repeat visitors and I average about 30 repeat visitors a day.
@ Shirazi, Dr. Farrukh: Thank you
@ Alias: Feed ads, I might try them, thanks for the suggestion
I wonder does things like AdSense work in Pakistan? seems that payment reciving process is very complicated[like Paypal] that’s why people don’t try much.
Awab, really interesting post and I have been regualrly folliowing the comments the last few days. Makes me think again that it woudl be good to have these disucssions on the technicalities of blogging amongst Paksitani bloggers somewhere. I know you guys had set up teh discussion list at bloggers.pk but that seemed to haev never picked up (although it proved useful to me as I started because a number of my key questions got answered there). Beyond that its been great having more experienced folks like you and Shirazi guiding newcomers like me through teh ins and outs of this (especially, in my case, your detailed help as we moved ATP to its own domain).
On to the subject, I remember when I first started my blog and did a first post, I sent out the link to 5 people. I was amazed teh next day to see over 30 hits. Its caught up a lot since then but now my real challenege is to tear myself away from the obsession with stats etc. so that does not take over life. I like stats in general so it is easy to get sucked into this. In general, I find that about half the people who now come to the site come through searches; many come looking for the wrong thing and soon leave; some, however, stay on to explore and we have a steady trickle of 2-3 new email subscribers a day, which I think becomes the real base. Another interesting thing is that while there is a hardcore set of people who regularly visit adn regularly comment, there are many times that many who do seem to come regulalry on a daily basis but rarely comment; shy, scared the the regulars will pounce on them, or just the ‘observer’ types. A key challenege for me has been to try to get them involved into teh conversation. Any hints?
Last thing on statistics. What I found very useful is an analysis of (a) where people are coming from and (b) when during the they they mostly come. I have a clustermaps account which was very useful. Also, found that the peak times are between 11PM and 1AM (my time) at night (which is early morning in Pakistan and Dubai and early evening on the East Coast) and then around 10AM to 12noon (my time) during the day (which is night in Pakistan and Dubai, late evening in Europe, and early morning on the US West Coast). We have actaully developed a system to putting up new posts aropund this daily cycle.
Thanks for a nice post and this opportunity to think out loud about this.