General

Thanks for the Hits! February 2009 Traffic Numbers

Pathetic. That’s what I’m calling my writing in February. Pathetic.

I thought January’s 19 articles was pitiful compared to my normal 30-40/month, but in February, I only wrote 12 measly articles. My excuse? School. I’m back to taking 2 classes plus working full-time, and it’s taken its toll on my writing. But counting this article and one I just wrote for March 2nd, I’m off to a good start for March.

Surprisingly, though, February’s traffic was on-par with January’s, even with 3 less days. If February was a full 31-day month, I would only have about 300 less pageviews and about 2,000 less visitors than January. So for some reason, you all keep coming back!

Oh, and I crossed over the 2,300 subscriber mark briefly. And I’m closing in on the 200 follower mark on Twitter. Not bad considering I’ve only promoted it by hiding the link to my Twitter feed in 2 other articles, and posted an icon in the subheader at the top of my site.

Traffic Sources

At a high level:

Search Engines: 64% (was 56% in Jan)

Referring Sites: 22% (was 27% in Jan)

Direct Traffic: 14% (was 17% in Jan)

Ohhh, so that’s where everyone’s coming from: via the search engines. I should have known better that people wouldn’t just come to my site thinking I wrote something new that day. And I doubt many other bloggers linked to me since I only had a couple gems worthy of linkage. Sigh.

Top Personal Finance Blog Referrers

And now to what everyone (or at least every PF blog) reads this article for: my top referrers for February. You’ll see last month’s rank after the new rank in (). If they weren’t ranked last month, you’ll see a (-).

Oh, and thanks to the bloggers who stuck through last month with me, considering the lack of decent articles! I hope to redeem myself soon!

1. (1) Five Cent Nickel
2. (2) My Money Blog
3. (7) Smart Spending
4. (3) No Credit Needed
5. (5) Free Money Finance
6. (6) Frugal Dad
7. (-) I’ve Paid for this Twice Already…
8. (8) Cheap Healthy Good
9. (10) Budgets are Sexy
10. (9) Bargaineering

Top Non-PF Blog Referrers

1. Google Search (51%)
2. Direct Traffic (14%)
3. MSN Search (7%)
4. Yahoo! Search (3%)
5. Google Reader and Homepage
6. Atlanta Journal-Constitution
7. AOL Search
8. Live Search
9. StumbleUpon
10. Search.com

Again, thanks to all my readers, fellow bloggers, commenters, search engines and scrapers for making this site such a success!

Oh wait, no thanks to the scrapers, specifically “fav.or.it” who only sent me 2, yes TWO, referrals last month, That’s my “benefits” they say I’d get for “allowing” them to scrape my full feed AND comments and display on their site. Luckily I’ve gotten my content and YOUR comments removed, but also with the help of many of my fellow bloggers who barraged them with demands for days before they yielded. We bloggers must always be vigilant for splogs and scrapers. It’s hard enough to write 12 articles in a month, and then see someone stealing it all to boost their own site’s rankings.