aaronfalloon.com

April blog review

Posted on May 2nd, 2008.

Another eventful month has past, and sadly there’s been no growth in traffic. However, I’ve got an excuse. The 2 days of downtime have obviously had a negative effect on this blog’s success, but I’m not going to complain. Every time there’s a problem and I fix it, I learn something new.

Visitors

The total number of unique visitors in April was 1,551.This was significantly less than the number in March (but don’t forget about the downtime). Many of the visitors (1,325) were absolute unique visitors, which is both bad and good. Good because it suggests that many people are finding my site, but bad because my content isn’t retaining any new visitors I get.

The highest percentage of traffic came from referring sites, with powerdropping.com, entrecard.com, and namepros.com being the top 3 referrers. It’s great to see namepros.com in the top 3 as unlike the traffic from powerdropping.com and entrecard.com, the traffic from nampros.com is targeted. To highlight this I did some maths, on average, visitors from namepros.com view 0.54 pages more than those from the other top 3 referrers.

This is the first month were a search engine other than Google, provided me with visitors. Google, as usual, provided me with a good amount of traffic (36 visitors). However, it was nice to see Microsoft’s Live Search providing me with some traffic

Content

Unfortunately, this month was one of the first in a long time were I didn’t stick to my posting frequency of a post every 3 days.

This blog received 1,896 pageviews in April, which although lower than in March, is actually quite high when compared to the number of visitors. It suggests that people are spending a little longer on my site.

The 3 most popular posts in April were my posts on content generators (which received a good amount of search engine traffic), website flipping, and my interview with Jon Warass.

Miscellaneous

As always, I’m looking to increase the number of backlinks this site has, and I’m happy to report that aaronfalloon.com now has 803 backlinks. It’s fantastic to see such a large jump from that in March.

If you read my blog reviews, you’ll learn that I like websitegrader.com, but unfortunately my website grade for this month fell to 72/100 which is disappointing. However, I’m going to work hard to get it back up again.

My Alexa rank dropped further from 346,306 to 170,993. However, this may have had something to do with Alexa changing the way they work out their traffic rank out. My Technorati rank actually decreased this month to 927,370, which I’m very pleased with.

Blog improvements

As many of you have noticed, I now have a Google ad running on each post. I thought it was time to implement some form of monetisation, because I just kept putting it of and I couldn’t do that forever.

I also implemented my new blog structure, and have organised my posts into better categories which will make finding things a lot easier.

Bar that, I haven’t made many improvements.

Plans for May

My main plan for May is to get everything back to normal. After experiencing downtime, I want everything to settle back down.

I’d also like to keep to my posting frequency again, and get into a better routine of writing posts.

April has been both good and bad. The 2 days of downtime obviously affected my rankings in many ways, but it’s not all about big numbers. Content quality is a much better thing to strive for, and I hope to improve my writing style and content significantly in May.

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A proper back-up solution

Posted on April 29th, 2008.

I’m going to try and mention this only one more time. This blog has been hacked into three times since it began way back in September. Furthermore, I suffered a hard-drive failure in December, and lost all blog posts prior to that. Each time, I’ve learnt something new and I’ve finally decided to spend some money on a proper back-up solution, MozyHome Unlimited.

It’s a data back-up service (obviously) which basically copies and stores all of your data on a server somewhere (I think). I’ve been using it now for only two days, and I’m already impressed.

Essentially, you sign-up online and download their software application. Once you’ve installed the application, you begin a setup wizard. You need to enter your Mozy username and password, and follow the rest of the instruction. Both installation and configuration where a breeze, and after about 10 minutes, I was away.

Mozy’s application runs in the background, uploading all of your files without you even knowing. You can choose exactly what you want to back-up. However if you think you’re going to suffer a data loss soon, only back-up your most important files. All of my data won’t be backed up for another 2 weeks! Of course, if you’ve got a faster internet connection than me, your data will be uploaded quicker.

However, once the initial back-up is complete, future back-ups won’t take as long as only files which have been modified since the last back-up are uploaded.

For those looking for a simple, yet safe and effective back-up solution, then Mozy really is the answer. I do worry however, that downloading all of the data again may take a long time.

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