Finances & Money

Thanks for the Hits! July 2008 Traffic and Referral Numbers

July was a better month than June 2008 with regards to traffic numbers, and CleverDude.com continues to achieve year-over-year increases.

Also, I’ve just beaten all of 2007’s traffic with 5 months left in 2008!

And that counts the literal explosion of Digg and Lifehacker traffic in Feb/March 2007. I haven’t had any days in 2008 with much more than 2000-3000 visitors, but it’s been consistent which is the best type of growth (to me at least).

Subscribers

I came oh so close to passing 1,900 subscribers last month. Perhaps I’ll cross 2,000 this month? Perhaps I’ll actually write some intriguing and useful content this month?

Traffic Sources

At a high level:

Search Engines: 42%

Referring Sites: 42%

Direct Traffic: 16%

I had more referrals last month (thanks mostly to MSN Smart Spending and StumbleUpon) which took some percentage points away from search referrals. Although I’d like to see much more search traffic, I also like seeing other sites linking to me. I’m happy with the best of both worlds I guess.

Top Personal Finance Blog Referrers

So which Personal Finance site sent the most traffic my way in July? How did they compare to last month’s rankings? Well, you’ll see last month’s rank after the new rank in (). If they weren’t ranked last month, you’ll see a (-). As a note, I’m not considering major multi-author or commercial blogs in this list (see next section):

1. (1) My Money Blog
2. (10) Quest for Four Pillars (Personal Finance Network Buddy!)
3. (2) Five Cent Nickel
4. (-) Canadian Capitalist (Personal Finance Network Buddy!)
5. (10) No Credit Needed
6. (7) Cheap Healthy Good
7. (4) Frugal Dad
8. (-) Blunt Money (Personal Finance Network Buddy!)
9. (6) I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…
10. (5) Free Money Finance and Money Ning (Personal Finance Network Buddy!)

As a note, the fifth fellow PFN buddy, Squawkfox, just missed the list by about 7 referrals. Thanks everyone! I couldn’t have made my numbers without you!

How many hits does it take to be the top personal finance blog referrer? 580. How about number 2? Well that one’s a littler easier at just 378.

Top Non-PF Blog Referrers

Here are the search engine, group blog, non-PF blog and other referrers for July. For the first few sites, their total traffic is in parentheses:

1. Google Search (37%)
2. Direct Traffic (15%)
3. MSN Smart Spending (9%)
4. Google Reader and Homepage
5. StumbleUpon
6. Lending Club Blog
7. Yahoo! Search
8. AOL Search
9. Zen Habits (still pulling in links from his Brown Bag article last year)
10. MSN Search (MSN and/or Live Search)

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