More than 1,000 unique visitors and going strong

This month is the first month my Web site has seen over 1,000 unique visitors. For a couple of months it came excruciatingly close, hitting 982 in December 2006 and 992 in January 2007. And although March is not over yet—we still have three more days—there have been nearly 1,300 unique visitors already.

I started with this domain name (mcmvanbree.com) around November or December 2004 and started Dutch Perspective in September 2005 with content management software, switching to WordPress in February 2006.

Here follows an overview of my traffic during the month of March in 2005, 2006 and 2007:

March 2005
The Web site was about four months old and beginning to take form. Fourteen unique visitors saw the Web site and it received 2,887 hits. I am fairly certain I was responsible for most of those hits, as I was updating and testing the Web site.

The most viewed page was the index page and 2 different key phrases in search engines delivered 1 hit from MSN and 1 hit from AltaVista.

March 2006
By October 2005, Wikipedia linked to my article about metrosexuality, resulting in quite a large increase in traffic. In February 2006, I started working with WordPress and my blog Dutch Perspective settled. The Web site got a boost with 420 unique visitors and 16,918 hits. Possibly quite a few of those hits were due to the constant updating and editing of the lay out of the blog with the WordPress software.

The most viewed page was “portfolio.htm,” which served as a portal to the metrosexual article. (I thought people might see my other work if they caught a glimpse of the rest of my portfolio.) By this time, search engines knew how to find my site and 89 different key phrases and 200 different key words delivered 116 hits from Google, 4 hits from Yahoo and several single hits from other search engines.

Search engine key words included (1) metrosexual (2) bree (3) marc (4) dutch (5) masculinity. Notable for March 2006 was the amount of links from e-mail messages; I suspect that a link for the metrosexual article was e-mailed around.

March 2007
As my RSS feed subscriptions kept growing, the number of visitors did as well. This morning I checked my FeedBurner account and it stated 43 subscribers, of which 11 are subscribed through my personal favorite, Bloglines. As of March 28, 2007 at 11:00 a.m. (CT), there were 1,279 unique visitors and 25,099 hits.

Not surprisingly, the most viewed page was “dutchperspective/feed” Hits from search engines continued to grow with 213 different key phrases and 440 different key words delivering 187 hits from Google, 35 hits from Yahoo, 15 hits from MSN, 3 hits from Ask, 2 hits from AltaVista, and several single hits from other search engines.

Metrosexual still remains the most used key word, although its share in the total pool is in decline. Other key words are (2) dutch (3) bree (4) [public] relations (5) exxon.

Conclusion
This Web site might not grow explosively like some of the Internet trends that have popped up throughout the years, but there is a steady and strong increase in unique visitors. In this first quarter of 2007, the Web site has seen almost half the visitors of the entire year in 2006.

It is also interesting to see how the metrosexual article put my Web site on the map and in the sight line of search engines, but now the RSS feed is the most important factor. Clearly, this follows the overall Internet trend of moving from static content to dynamic content.

I am not going to set any traffic goals for next March, as this Web site does not exist for gaining traffic. It’s quality before quantity and that also counts for visitors (I’d rather have 10 significant visitors than 100 people passing by).

Update: now that the month has passed, the total amount of unique visitors for March 2007 was 1,457. Total visits amassed to 4,431; total pages to 11,836; and total hits to 29,081.

28 March 2007 | Across the board, New Media and Blogosphere, Web site Updates | Comments