November traffic numbers for German History Blog

I’ve been making it a habit to post monthly traffic figures for my German History Blog (GHB). In early October I posted my August and September numbers, and then in early November I posted my October numbers. Now it’s time to show November’s numbers..

Good news: November showed significantly improved traffic results, despite the fact that I’ve done nothing on the blog for the last two weeks because of vacation. Here’s the rundown:

German History Blog
Month	Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages
2009-08	157	206	670
2009-09	166	181	332
2009-10	365	444	800
2009-11	808	865	1400

Two things worked well for me in November:

• Guest blogging. I did three guest blog posts in November, which gave me traffic from those sites to mine. Guest blog posts really are golden. I need to do more.
• Keyword SEO. For the first time ever, I worked on targeting a specific keyword phrase — “berlin wall” — above and beyond the very general keyword which I would love to dominate some day, “german history.” The reason I chose that was because November was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The targeting paid off — a lot of people (by my standards!) found me by searching for “berlin wall”. In all, a nice 73% of the visitors found me via search engines. I’m very happy about that.

So I’m quite pleased by the increase, particularly considering the lack of activity during my vacation. It makes me think that if I really set my mind to it, I can grow the readership considerably.

Income from the site is still at zero dollars and zero cents! Of course I haven’t really been offering anything other than Amazon affiliate links, and those links (I’m told) typically convert at about 0.5%, which means I’d have to get 200 clicks on product links to get even one sale. There were not 200 clicks on Amazon links at GHB in November.

So I’m still far away from GHB paying for itself, which is my initial goal. To do that, it would have to take in — I guess — about $30 per month.

Onwards!

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

P.S. A big thanks goes out to the guys and gals at the SSWT Elite forum, who have always told me to keep on going with GHB and give it a chance to grow and — perhaps — make at least some money some day. They’ve also offered some great suggestions which I hope to start implementing when I finally get back from vacation.

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