Meanwhile, Back on the Blog...

A little changing, a bit of re-arranging on this beautiful NY Sunday afternoon. I've got two cookouts coming up: one this afternoon at 5 and another on Memorial Day. I'd like to call your attention to a test-ad running just under my blog header: a way you can help increase your blog's earning potential via PR7 links! It's well worth investigating for any of you looking to make serious full or part-time income from your blog. (And if you're earning some coin already, this will help your income multiply!)

I've been studying blog traffic and the amount of time visitors spend on the blog. Since I had a little extra time today, and since traffic last year was light during Memorial Day Weekend, I decided this would be a good time to take a sample.

1 - Nothing "unusual" going on - no recent posts generating special buzz or getting noticed by search-engines

2 - Nothing new of mine showing up on StumbleUpon or Blokube - no rush of links from twitter or facebook

(In other words: a "mellow" moment in digital time!)

3 - I selected the timeframe 10:48pm EDST Saturday through 10:48am EDST Sunday: figuring that the lighter traffic load would still give me a good snapshot of "normal" activity.

4 - I'm satisfied with the results! I know that I'm on the right blogging pathway: it'll just take a little more time and tinkering to tweak things exactly how I'd like them to be!

Incoming Traffic Sources:

32% - Google

24% - Google Images

22% - direct traffic to my blog's URL

7% - No data available

Traffic from StumbleUpon, Bing, Entrecard and a few blogs and other resources came in the 2% to 4% range for each.

I've got some work to do! The bounce rate is high: I notice visitors come in, scan a post for 30-40 seconds... and they're gone! That's where these numbers come in handy:

12% - visitors stayed on the blog for more than 1 minute

6% - stayed on the blog for more than 5 minutes

WARNING! A high bounce rate doesn't mean bad things! Going back to 2005, I've had people comment on particular posts - and it is quite obvious they read the post - and when I match the comment IP to the one in stats - "Time spent on site = 0 minutes." So these stat and site meters may not be recording as much data as they would have us believe?

I was able to go into the data and see which posts attracted these readers - there were 14 specific posts, each visited by more than one individual. I already knew netizens would find these particular posts interesting. The same ones show up on a daily basis when I check my stats. So, my mission is to figure out how to write more of these types of posts.

Why? I'm focusing on the blog's "sticky-ness" because I believe the longer a visitor stays on-site, the more apt they are to bookmark my blog in one way or another... the more likelythey are to click on a link to another post... the more likely they are to click on one of my adverts' links! So there is a method developing here...