General

Thanks for the Hits: April 2008 Traffic and Referral Numbers

Now that April has come to a close, I’ve tallied the (almost) final traffic numbers and determined that although not as big as March, April was still a success. I had over 26,000 visitors and over 40,000 pageviews, but the more important thing to note is that I’ve consistently had 800-1000 visitors per day. It shows that Clever Dude is still growing in readership and maintaining steady growth.

Subscriber Growth

Speaking of readership, the blog has grown from about 500 readers a year ago to over 1600 readers now! Apparently I’m doing something right, or I just have a bunch of robots scraping my feed daily. Either way, it’s readers right?

Now if you want to be one of my daily subscribers, you have 2 options: RSS Feeds or Email. If you don’t know what RSS is, but read a number of blogs daily, I highly suggest getting an account with Google Reader. I alone read over 100 sites per day, and if I were to bookmark every one of them, I would never get around to reading their stuff.

But if you prefer to just receive my articles via Email, you’ll only get at most one email per day with everything I’ve written in the last 24 hours. If I don’t write anything, then you don’t get an email. And you can unsubscribe very easily by clicking a link in the email. If you’re worried about me having your info, Feedburner.com manages the subscriptions and emails. I just provide the links and the content.

Google Pagerank Update

On April 30th, I received a new Pagerank of 5 (up from 4). Some people say that PR is worthless now, but many advertisers still base their prices off your ranking. What’s important is that my incoming searches have increased to over 50% of my total visitors (see below).

Top Keyword Searches

The searches that bring people to my site haven’t really changed since last month. The top 6 are still:

1. Free Laptop Nation
2. Free Laptop
3. CarFax
4. Technical Service Bulletins (or TSBs)
5. Clothing Donation Values (for tax purposes)
6. Clever Dude

I’ve rolled up variations of each keyword into one phrase (e.g. “free laptop” and “get free laptop” are about the same). Also, these are just 6 of about 7,800 different keywords that brought users to Clever Dude in April. Maybe some day I’ll post some of the stranger ones, such as “101 most romantic ways to suck up” (seriously, this was one).

Traffic Sources

So where did my traffic come from in April? Well, at a high level, here is the breakdown:

Search Engines: 56%

Referring Sites: 30%

Direct Traffic: 14%

Having more search engine traffic is optimal because they’re the ones more apt to click through my advertisements or affiliate links than my general daily readers (if my goal is to make money). Otherwise, I’m happy to have all types of traffic sources, and thank all the other sites who link to Clever Dude. Now, onto the referral rankings.

Top PF Blog Referrers

So which Personal Finance site sent the most traffic my way in April? How did they compare to last month’s rankings? Well, you’ll see last month’s rank after the new rank in (). If they weren’t ranked last month, you’ll see a (-).

1. (3) Five Cent Nickel
2. (4) My Money Blog
3. (2) Single Ma’s Fabulous Financials
4. (1) The Simple Dollar
5. (9) Mrs. Micah: Finance for a Freelance Life
6. (-) Frugal Dad
7. (10) Blogging Away Debt
8. (-) Blueprint for Financial Prosperity
9. (7) I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…
10. (5) No Credit Needed

Top Non-PF Blog Referrers

Up through #9 is the actual overall order of all referrers. From there, the PF blog referrers (Nickel first) start mixing in:

1. Google Search (47% of all traffic, up from 30% last month)
2. Direct Traffic (15%)
3. Google Reader and Homepage
4. MSN Search
5. Yahoo Search
6. Fatwallet Forums (thanks to a link in this post)
7. Live Search
8. StumbleUpon
9. AOL Search
10. Mom Advice

Again, thanks to all my readers, fellow bloggers, commenters and scrapers for making this site such a success!