State of the Blog: November 2007 Recap

I wrote this post a few days ago but I couldn't post it. But in this few days this blog saw some big changes, so I'll add those as a prefix here.

Firstly, I added this beautiful menu bar you see at the top of the blog. I also did some simple yet important changes to the blog design in terms of features, color, layout and advertisement placement. I wanted the blog to be more user friendly and look more like a conventional website.

According to an opinion poll conducted a few months back, majority of the Internet users don't like or trust blogs. I guess there is good reason for it too and I also used to think like that before I started blogging. So these changes should have an impact on visitor satisfaction and ad performance. So I can't wait to analyze the visitor statistics in a month or so to see how these changes affected visitor trends and ad conversion rates.

Secondly, I got a small traffic tsunami this first week of December. (Oh dear, the Tsunami disaster is going to be 3 years this boxing day isn't it?) Anyway, I got nearly 2000 page views in the last four days alone! It gave me a huge boost. Of course it's not much by Internet standards and a short lived spiked but I was over the moon. The traffic was mainly thanks to uniquedaily.com and limks.com linking to my post about the world's largest puzzle. So the things I've written below about November traffic pales in comparison. Here is the post I wrote.

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2nd December...
Today, while thinking what to blog about I realized it is was a long time since I told you about my blogging experience. The last time was the 10 Blogger Blogspot tips post which was over 3 months ago! How soon time passes.

Anyway, the last time I wrote about Google Adsense was this welcome back post after a short blogging break. In it I have said I was happy about getting 20-30 daily visitors and earning 10 to 15 US cents a day! I'm surprised I was happy at that time with those figures. Now I'm not happy if I don't get 100 visitors a day or earn a dollar. (Sign of growing avarice?) Anyway the thing is, thanks to God Planet Apex is growing. Here is a recap of the blog's performance in November.

Planet Apex gets Page Rank 3
Last month, November 2007 was the best month so far for me. First came the news of Google's Page Rank (PR) update. The defacto Internet Judgment Day. It didn't disturb me because with a Google PR of zero I had nothing to loose. But the Google Emperor was kind with me. He bestowed me with a  Page Rank of 3.

I was expenting a pagerank update for a long time, but I don't know exactly what pr I wanted. Anyway, a PR of 3 for Planet Apex was not bad. In fact, it maybe fantastic. Just have look at this list of what happened to bigtime bloggers at the October end PR update.

• Engadget.com (dropped from PR 7 to 5)
• AutoBlog.com (from 6 to 4)
• Problogger.net (from 6 to 4)
• Copyblogger.com (from 6 to 4)
• SearchEngineJournal.com (from 7 to 4)
• QuickOnlineTips.com (from 6 to 3)
• SearchEngineRoundtable.com (from 7 to 4)
• BlogHerald.com (from 6 to 4)
• WeblogToolsCollection.com (from 6 to 4)
• JohnChow.com (from 6 to 4)

Maybe Google thought they gave too much power to sites with higher PR's, and all the advertising revenue that came with it. So it might have being a day of equalizing. (But really these blogs are excellent blogs. They deserved the high Page Rank they had. If you want to make money on the web you should read them regularly.)

Planet Apex and November Blog Traffic
So November really kicked off with the new PR. Here is the blog traffic chart from sitemeter.com, one of the traffic counters I use. For November I got around 2400 visitors about 3500 page views.


If you look at the chart closely you'll notice from around 12-13th there is increase in traffic. That's due to traffic from Google search engine. I think thats when the new Google PageRank factor became effective for this blog, though the update happened at the end of October.

And also in November the blog shift in blog traffic wise from Kottu traffic to Google traffic. Before November most of my blog visitors came from Kottu, the leading Sri Lankan blog aggregator site. And the traffic use to fluctuate a lot. The days I wrote a blog post, I got 30-50 visitors from Kottu and the other days only 10-20 visitors from search engines or  repeat visitors.

Maybe Kottu traffic is down because I haven't written on things like black tigers, foreign invaders or the downfall of Sinhalese or about unusual Tamil men. Topics like these really attract Kottu readers. In fact I have a notion that while the world writes for Digg and Stubleupon, Sri Lankan bloggers write for Kottu.

Another reason for Kottu traffic reduction can be with the recent increase in the number of Sri Lankan bloggers now fresh posts get buried in Kottu sooner. I think Kottu will have to think about categorizing Kottu blogs or using a tagging system like that used in Technorati or a voting system like in Digg or stumbleupon. Something for Kottu admin Indi to think about.

Another thing about my November traffic was I started to get a few Yahoo search visitors everyday. This trend corresponded with the Google traffic increase days. I did hear something about Yahoo! and MSN forming a partnership with Google to adapt their pagerank system. So does this mean Yahoo is now depending on Googles pagerank ranking?

As far as individual posts were concerned, the top posts in the blog are;

• Meet world's new richest man: Mexican Businessman Carlo Slims
  
• Sri Lankan Mahendra Amarasuriya becomes new president of Lions Club International
• 25 Unbelievably beautiful sceneries and pictures
• Al Burj Tower - Dubai building 1km high World's Tallest Landmark
• Intranet Benefits: 6 Major Benefits of Building an Intranet
• Pictures of Palm Island Dubai: World's biggest artificial islands
• The ranking of the world's most expensive cities
• 10 Rare Tips and Tricks for Your Blogspot Blog
• GPI Ranking of countries from most peaceful to least peaceful
• Something to think about - If the World were only 100 people
  

I was surprised to see the post about 6 major benefits of intranets getting some Google traffic. For some reason some of my earliest posts got into Google's Supplementary index. (for good reason this index is also known as Google Hell). It was a disappointment because they have very useful information about Intranets. I hope they have now moved to the main index. Anyway I'll list them here. It may help them get into the main index when Google bot comes crawling.

• General Information to Build an Intranet Better
  
• Define Intranet - What is an Intranet?
  
• 60 Kinds of Applications and Information Found on Intranet
  
• Intranet Benefits: 6 Major Benefits of Building an Intranet
  
• The Challenges of Building An Intranet (Technical, Financial & Managerial)
  
• Management Issues of Intranet Development: In-house and Outsourcing
  

Planet Apex Blog Earnings
No recap of a blog running advertisements is complete without a income statement. As much as people like to make money on the web they also like to read about how much others earn. November was satisfactory for me in that score too. Google Adsense prohibits to to explicitly disclose details, (and I'm not John Chow to Google bomb and get away) so I'll tell you vaguely that I earned a little less 25 US dollars. (in October I got around 15$). Inshallah, I hope to get more than that this month.