Since I started self-hosting this blog again on August 6 2008, I have been trying to find more ways to pull traffic toward the content that I put up. Like all bloggers, I feel that I have important things to say (at least in the area of Web performance), and ideas that should be read by as many people as possible.

As well, I have realized that if I invest some time and effort into this blog, it can be a small revenue source that could get me that much closer to my dream of a MacBook Pro.

The Analysis

In a post yesterday morning, Darren Rowse had some advice on when the best time to release new post is. Using his ideas as the framework, I pulled the data out of my own tracking database and came up with the chart below. This shows the page view data between September 1 2007 and September 15 2008 based on the day of the week vistors came to the site.

Using this data and the general framework that Darren subscribes to, I should be releasing my best and newest thoughts in a week on Monday and Tuesday (GMT).

After Wednesday, I should release only less in-depth articles, with a focus on commentary on news and events. And I must learn to breathe, as I suffer from an ailment all to common in bipolars: a lack of patience.

A new post doesn’t immediately find its target audience unless you have hundreds or thousands (Tens? Ones?) of readers who are influential. If you are luckyin this regard, then these folks will leave useful comments, and through their own attention, help gently show people that a new post is something they should devote their valuable attention towards.

It takes a while for any post to percolate through the intertubes. So patience you must have.

Front-loaded v Long-tailed

Unless, of course, your traffic model is completely different than a popular blogger.

The one issue that I had with Darren’s guidance is that it applies only to blogs that are front-loaded. A front-loaded blog is one that is incredibly popular, or has a devoted, active audience who help push page views toward the most recent 3-5 posts. Once the wave has crested, or the blogger has posted something new, the volume of traffic to older posts falls off exponentially, except in the few cases of profound or controversial topics.

When I analyzed my own traffic, I found that the most of my traffic volume was aimed toward posts from 2005 and 2006. In fact, more recent posts are nowhere near as popular as these older posts. In contrast to the front-loaded blog, mine is long-tailed.

There are a number of influential items in my blog which have proven staying power, which draw people from around the world. They have had deep penetration into search engines, and are relvant to some aspect of peoples’ lives that keeps pulling them back.

Summary

I would highly recommend analyzing your traffic to see it is front-loaded or long-tailed. I know that I wish that this blog  was more front-loaded, with an active community of readers and commentators. However, I am also happy to see that I have created a few sparks of content that keep people returning again and again. If your blog is  long-tailed, then when you post becomes far less relevant than ensuring the freshness and validity of those few popular posts. Ensure that these are maintained and current so that they remain relevant to as many people as possible.

Tags: analysis, analytics, blog posts, Blogging, content creation, content release, current, Darren Rowse, freshness, front-loaded, hits, long tail, maintain, page views, posting, search engines, statistics, traffic, update, Web Performance

Steven Hodson of WinExtra posted a screenshot of his personal Wordpress stats for the last three years last night. I then posted my stats for a similar period of time, and Steven shot back with some question about traffic, and the ebbs and flows of readers.

Being the stats nut that I am, I went and pulled the data from my own tracking data, and came up with this.

I made a conscious choice to analyze what year the posts being read were posted in. I wanted to understand when people read my content, which content kept people coming back over and over again. The chart above speaks for itself: through most of the last year it’s clear that the most popular posts were made in 2005.

What is also interesting is the decreasing interest in 2007 posts as 2008 progressed. Posts from 2006 remained steady, as there are a number of posts in that year that amount to my self-help guides to Web compression, mod_gzip, mod_deflate, and Web caching for Web administrators.

This data is no surprise to me, as I posted my rants against Gutter Helmet and their installation process in 2005. Those posts are still near the top of the Google search response for term “Gutter Helmet”. And improving the performance of a Web site is of great interest to many Apache server admins and Web site designers.

What is also clear is that self-hosting my blog and the posting renaissance it has provoked has driven traffic back to my site.

So, what lessons did I learn from this data?

1. Always remember the long tail. Every blogger wants to be relevant, on the edge, and showing that they understand current trends. The people who follow those trends are a small minority of the people who read blogs. Google and other search engines will expose them to your writings in the time of their choosing, and you may find that the three year-old post gets as much traffic as the one posted three hours ago
2. Write often. I was in a blogging funk when my blog was at Wordpress.com. As a geek, I believe that the lack of direct control over the look and feel of my content was the cause of this. In a self-hosted environment, I feel thta I am truly the one in charge, and I can make this blog what I want.
3. Be cautious of your fame. If your posts are front-loaded, i.e. if all your readers read posts from the month and year they are posted in, are you holding people’s long-term attention? What have you contributed to the ongoing needs of those who are outside the technical elite? What will drive them to keep coming to your site in the long run?

So, I post a challenge to other bloggers out there. My numbers are miniscule compared to the blogging elite, but I am curious to get a rough sense of how the long tail is treating you.

Tags: apache, blog stats, caching, fame, Google, Gutter Helmet, long tail, posts, search engines, search response, statistics, Steven Hodson, top posts, Web administrators, Web caching, Web compression, Web site designers

Ok, for the average viewer a 0.25 second improvement doesn’t look like much.

CLICK IMAGE

However, this is extrememly deceptive. The searches were using the the bare minimum terms necessary.

http://www.feedster.com/search.php?q=[SEARCH TERM]

This stopped working correctly last night. Effectively, it looks like Feedster’s Date Search is broken. How did I figure this out? Well, the size of the results page went from 30,000+ bytes to 15,000+ bytes. This is always a clue that either:

1. The server has started using a compression technology
2. The page being returned is not the one you expect

I have switched the measurements back to Relevance Searches; these are less important to blog searches (more like old-school search engines). This will keep Feedster on an even par with everyone else, it will have to stay this way until Feedster fixes their Date Search.

The new search is:

http://www.feedster.com/search.php?q=[SEARCH TERM]&sort=relevance

I would love to hear from the Feedster team when they have fixed this issue.

UPDATE: Scott Johnson and Jeff Kletsky from Feedster dropped by. The relevance search is back up and running, and the measurement has been updated accordingly.

Tags: blog, compress, compression, feeds, GrabPERF, HTTP, IE, IM, improvement, it, measurement, media, Om, One, PHP, pr, run, search, search engines, server, update

Ok, this is a little weird.

First, go look at this page.

What’s weird in this data is the difference that you can see between the one-word and the two-word searches.

I was asked to look into this by someone at one of the Blog Search Engines (who shall remain anonymous), under the suspicion that there would be some difference in the performance of these these two-searches.

I want to watch this for a while before I publish the next Search Index results. What I am seeing here is that there could be a methodological issue in the search. Be interesting to see how these react to three word searches.

If any of the folks from the search engines want to chat about this, drop a comment in the usual place.

Tags: blog, data, GrabPERF, GrabPERF.org, HTML, HTTP, it, Om, One, performance, search, search engines

When I look at my logs, I am always astounded by the items visitors come to read.

The one posting that I am most proud of is this one, where I do not sing the praises of Gutter Helmet.

b2evolution only maintains local hit logs for 30 days. In that time, there is a serious pattern appearing.

URL					NUM
----					------
Home Page				116
Why I Will Not Recommend Gutter Helmet	105
This is your host on South Park		30

I have been watching this for a while, so on Monday, I wrote a letter to some of the executives at Gibraltar Industries [here], the holding company that now owns Gutter Helmet.

Dear Gibraltar Industries:

I saw that your company has just purchased Gutter Helmet. Congratulations.

I thought you and your team would like to know that my blog post detailing my experience with a Gutter Helmet installation is near the top of Google Search for the phrase “gutter helmet”.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22gutter+helmet%22 –> it’s the link from the IceRocket blogsearch engine

I get between 5 and 10 visits a day where people are reading what my experience with the Gutter Helmet installation team was like.

Gutter Helmet is a great product. The team that installed it failed miserably in making us happy.

Good luck, and remember: the conversation you don’t hear will be the one that hurts you the most.

stephen

On Monday, there was a huge flurry of hits from Gutter Helmet IPs and others, including what looked like Gibraltar’s very high-priced law firm.

And you know what?

They didn’t bother to respond.

So, I will continue to de-evangalize Gutter Helmet, as they are stuck in a negative customer experience death-spiral. If they can’t get over the big company, “One complaining customer is nothing” attitude, they will continue experience the force of a customer scorned. And when new prospects research the Gutter Helmet product, they will continue to encounter my negative experience high on the search engines’ lists.

Gibraltar Industries: I am now defining the conversation around the Gutter Helmet product, and you have no control over that. If you don’t believe this has an impact, follow the thread and conversation around Jeff Jarvis’ experience with Dell [here].

IceRocket: Gutter Helmet, gutters, contractors, customer service

Tags: Acquisition, Dear Gibraltar Industries, Dell, Gibraltar, Google, Gutter Helmet, high-priced law, Jeff Jarvis, One, search engines, South Park

Ensight and Blog Herald both discuss the floundering and thrashing of Technorati.

My take is that they are having a success failure.

© 2005 GrabPERF

This is how long it takes their servers to deliver on a simple search for “new york”. I have discussed at various points throughout the last week that there are some steps that Technorati could take to try and resolve their Web performance issues.

Technorati Search Content is still, for the most part, relevant for my needs. But I use Google most of the time, and just changed my Pinger to hit Ping-O-Matic to get into more search engines. Also a lot of good talk about IceRocket’s Blog Search tool.

If the Technorati team moves toward selling their services to businesses and corporations (a blog monitoring service), they are definitely putting the cart before the horse. Abandoning your core business to try and appeal to a “broader market” very rarely works.

And why are we having this discussion at all?

Because, dammit, we actually thought Technorati was different.

UPDATE: Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek found this post. [here]

Technorati: web performance, HTTP, Technorati

Tags: app, blog, business, content, EAD, Google, GrabPERF, HTML, HTTP, IM, Issues, it, live, media, Om, performance, performance issues, search, search engines, server, steps, success failure, Technorati, update, web, Web Performance, Web+performance, WebPerformance.Org

I don’t. I just checked my blog stats for referrals from search engines.

Technorati outpaces Google. All because I started tagging my posts.

Cool.

Technorati: SEO, Google, Technorati

Tags: blog, blog stats, cool, Google, HTTP, IM, media, Om, posts, search, search engines, seo, Technorati

1. Search engines like the word Microsoft
2. People like Microsoft and Dinosaur in the same phrase
3. Putting the names “Dave Winer” or “Robert Scoble” in any post raises its visibility

Tags: cro, hits, it, Microsoft, search, search engines