Finances & Money • General

Thanks for the Hits: January 2009 Numbers

January 2009 saw a decent uptick in incoming traffic, however this time it wasn’t from any single big source like in past months. Basically, it’s just more organic growth from search engines and word of mouth. I’m not averaging almost 1000 visitors and 1,600 pageviews per day. January also saw my 500,000th visitor since launching Clever Dude back in June 2006. I’m closing in on 900,000 pageviews and expect to hit that number halfway through February.

As far as subscribers, I’m still hovering around 2,200, but I haven’t been pushing my subscription links (think about subscribing to my RSS feed or email updates!). Honestly, I was pretty distracted by Twitter in January (follow me) and many of the ideas I would have normally flushed out into full articles were posted as 140 character (or less) snippets over there.

Surprisingly, my posting frequency really suffered in January as I only posted 19 times. That’s half my normal articles! What can I say? If I don’t have anything meaninful or insightful, then I won’t post just out of the need to write something. I want what’s posted on my site to be useful to you, my reader. Hopefully I’ll at least get back into the 20s in February though.

Traffic Sources

At a high level:

Search Engines: 56%

Referring Sites: 27%

Direct Traffic: 17%

Top Personal Finance Blog Referrers

And now to what everyone (or at least every PF blog) reads this article for: my top referrers for January. You’ll see last month’s rank after the new rank in (). If they weren’t ranked last month, you’ll see a (-).Actually, since I didn’t do numbers for December (I did them for the whole year), the comparison goes back to November.

1. (4) Five Cent Nickel
2. (3) My Money Blog
3. (5) No Credit Needed
4. (2) Canadian Capitalist
5. (6) Free Money Finance
6. (9) Frugal Dad
7. (-) Smart Spending
8. (-) Cheap Healthy Good
9. (-) Bargaineering (formerly Blueprint for Financial Prosperity)
10. (-) Budgets are Sexy

Congrats to J. Money for finally making the list at #10! He’s been vying for that spot for months now. And also thanks to Jim (Bargaineering) for FINALLY changing your site’s name. I hope that’s the last time I have to type out that old name.

Top Non-PF Blog Referrers

You’ll notice that Google has almost half of my traffic right now. While I don’t like having even half my eggs in one basket, there’s not much I can do about it:

1. Google Search (48%)
2. Direct Traffic (17%)
3. Yahoo! Search (3%)
4. Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2.5%)
5. Google Reader and Homepage
6. MSN Search
   
7. AOL Search
8. StumbleUpon
9. Live Search
10. Ask.com

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