Things have happened, changes are coming!
I’ve been busy lately. Here is a summary of my future plans:
- I will wrap up the visitor experiment soon.
- I will not be blogging as intensively in the coming weeks, but probably about twice a week.
- I will be forking the tech part of the blog to a separate and more professional site.
Check back for more details on the new tech blog soon. I will also write a couple of tech posts before the transition, as it will take some time to get the design done.
Today I have been spending an hour or two trying out different techniques to spread the word about my blog. It will be interesting to see the results tomorrow. I will probably need to spend more time if I want to get on the front page of digg or something, but I just don’t have that kind of time right now.
Therefore the visitor experiment is heading towards something like “how to get most possible visitors with the least amount of extra work”, which is also useful to know, of course.
If you feel like helping, I will just like to inform you that my site is digg-proof, and can take as much traffic as you can trow at it. Feel free to try to prove otherwise 
Now I am going out for the night, so surprise me with some amazing numbers, great tweets or just silence in the meantime.
As a part of my experiment to get more visitors, I have SEOed my blog. SEwhat? Search Engine Optimization. The art of making Google happy sure all the search engines are indexing your site in the best possible way.
The point of this is to get higher rankings, which (hopefully) translates into more hits on your site. Since part of my traffic already is coming from Google, I hope this has a visible effect.
How I did it
There are many ways going about SEO, in fact there are even tons of books about the subject. SEO can be your work if you are good enough. I am not, so I did it the easy way. Since I use WordPress for my blog, I just installed and configured the All in One SEO pack plugin.
If you haven’t got a clue at all about this, you don’t even have to configure it, the default config does wonders to your site ranking (or at least the developers of AiO SEO say so).
I am excited to si if it helps getting more hits through google. -10 internet points to the first person going to this page through Bing.
Statistics 16.09.09
A short update in a break from my studies: Here are the first results from Google Analytics. When I startet the experiment, I had close to no visitors. The graph shows a healthy start, with a double in visitors the third day.
My goal is simple: As many as possible. Can I go beyond 100? 1.000? 10.000? I don’t know. Let’s try. I have also seen that most of my traffic so far is from Facebook, Twitter and Google. Apparently many people like my cinnamon rolls. Direct traffic is also a measurable part of it, probably mostly me and my friends.
I have more tricks to come, but I will try to spread them out during the experiment. For now I am sticking with twitter and facebook, trying to let you share my blog with the world.
Google Analytics
The third stage of my visitor experiment is about getting statistics. I have already set up a basic stats page, but I want more info. Therefore I have now installed Google Analytics, a tool I’ve used in almost all of my previous website projects.
Google Analytics gathers a lot of important statistics for your site: Where did they find your site? What did they search for to get there through a search engine?
All of this can be used to further target your work towards sites you know give you visitors.
I will be sure to update if this information proves valuable.
