Traffic update time. Its been an interesting year, and as you can see, in overall site visits, I'm definitely seeing a slow upward trend. Now, as I've said time and again, I'm really writing this blog just to be writing, to exercise the muscles, so really, traffic doesn't concern me. However, I have seen the highest amounts of traffic at those times that I've written something that a lot of people end up reading. Primary examples of that include my post here on this blog about my first ImprovEverywhere experience. Thanks to their link I'm still getting random hits from their site - those readers helped push May past 500 unique visitors*, first month to accomplish that fact. An even better example came along in August, when RelevantMagazine.com ran an article of mine - that helped to push August over the 1000 unique visitors mark, nearly doubling May. Of course I also hosted Christian Carnival (still far and away my longest blog post ever) in August, so that brought a good deal of traffic too.

Point being, the more I write good, readable pieces, the more traffic I get, so I'm glad about the upward scale I'm seeing. And hopefully that will continue - I'm putting together a piece with the guys at Thrillist - don't know that I'll get direct blog traffic from that, but at least it will be out there. Also, I've started posting at Metafilter, after being a long-time reader. And commenting on sites like Metafilter and Lifehacker brings some traffic to boot. And I still need to get more stuff over to Dawn at Relevant...sheesh I've been meaning to do that like, forever.

So what else...referrers - not a lot of change here. In order of referrals, the top 5 go:

Blogger (thanks to the Next Blog button up top)
Google
ImprovEverywhere
Yahoo
Hotel California (still hanging onto #5 Dan, congrats)

I should point out that my blog is now making the top 10 results when you Google my first and last name, so I've started to see a number of hits for people searching for that - some from California.gov domains, ironically. Not sure if those people are putting 2 and 2 together on who I am, or am not, for that matter. Also, Googling the blog's name also gets about a top-5 result.

Still have repeat visitors out there, although more than 90% of my traffic is fresh blood. You regular readers know who you are - suffice to say the "Over 100 Visits" title is no longer given to one person only, and we're seeing a good deal of growth in the "26 to 100 Visits" category.

That's about it. You can stop being fascinated now.


* by "unique visitors" we mean new, first time clicks to my blog. Repeat views skews the overall numbers a good deal higher.