Fucked Up On Google Juice II

Now that the Official Chris Duncan Blog has been up a little over a month, I can cover my progress in promoting the site. The first month brought 564 unique visitors (we can chalk up 3 of those to me on my laptop, me at work, and me on my iPhone). Average time on the site is 1:37 which means people are actually reading what I post. A little over 70% of the 564 visitors only came once and never came back. However, that also means that the rest visited more than once -- about 70 people have visited 10+ times. How did that happen?

Most of My Traffic Came from Google
Google sent 251 visits (different than unique visitors) for 31% of the total visits. I can safely say that most people weren't looking for my blog. I catch a lot of random Playboy keywords from my posts about events, Mark Frazier, etc. I haven't gotten any traffic from Yahoo at this point. I think that once I get listed on other search engines, I should have a decent bump in traffic. I can only hope that some of these people decide to actually read my blog if they don't find what they're looking for. Here are a few examples of searches that landed on my site and probably didn't give the visitor what they were looking for: "masturbate with a vibrator", hugh laurie phoenix, kept as a latex maid, pete wentz interview, roy williams looks like cartoon, and watch bikini airways online. I call these Chris Duncan's Greatest Hits. Hopefully they liked the site anyway.

Direct Traffic Sent the Second Most Visits
Direct traffic is when somebody types in officialchrisduncan.com into their browser. So that as a second source is huge. Hopefully, that means that people remember the site and come back to it on their own later. It could also mean that somebody visits the OfficialChrisDuncan YouTube Channel and sees the URL in the actual video. So it's hard to understand where direct traffic comes from, but it's definitely the sign of an engaged visitor. I think one of the biggest parts of personal branding is wrapping all of your online identities together. My Flickr, YouTube Channel, Twitter, MySpace Profile, Facebook Page, and Digg/StumbleUpon accounts all point to each other. I'd rather have somebody see some content from me like a picture somewhere else (e.g. Flickr or Facebook) than force them to visit my site. In the last week, I have a YouTube video with almost 500 views and a Flickr image with 300+ views. People will find their way to your site if you have compelling content.

Digg and Reddit Round Out the Major Traffic Sources
I submit my own blog posts to Digg and Reddit. Yes, it's a little bit embarrassing that I'm the only one who usually likes them -- but it gets some decent traffic. I have to do more work on these networks to make a name for myself. Along with StumbleUpon, they are a great case to showcase your own interests and hopefully connect with people in a way that will get them to my site. This type of grassroots networking isn't just for social bookmarking sites. I also have to do a better job visits sites that I think have similar visitors to mine and begin commenting/posting on forums.

Uncounted Traffic
My goal is to put my site in as many places as possible. So it's fed into my MySpace profile, Facebook profile, and Facebook page. I'm pretty sure that my measuring for these sites (FeedBurner Live Hits) is less than accurate. The hard part is convincing people to actually visit my site instead of reading it on my Facebook profile. I plan on changing the Facebook feed to short previews instead of the entire post, so hopefully that sends more traffic to the site.

Momentum is Building
The site is definitely on the upswing. I can't always hope for an increase in traffic every day, but I do hope it becomes more stable. If I just take stats from the last week (and that includes 12 hours of downtime last night), I still have 420 unique visitors. Of those people, 20% have visited the site more than once. So there are a lot of people who want more Official Chris Duncan. And I haven't even started posting my homemade porn yet.