{"id":2002,"date":"2008-07-01T10:45:55","date_gmt":"2008-07-01T18:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/?p=2002"},"modified":"2008-07-01T10:45:55","modified_gmt":"2008-07-01T18:45:55","slug":"state-of-the-blog-update-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/2008\/07\/01\/state-of-the-blog-update-2\/","title":{"rendered":"State of the blog update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The first half of &#8217;08 is over, so what the heck, let&#8217;s look at how things are going around here. I shifted to Bay Area coverage around this time last year and installed a Google Analytics counter to measure our progress. Here&#8217;s what it looked like for the first 30 days I had the counter turned on:<\/p>\n<p><strong>July 15-August 14 2007:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>3,853 Visitors <\/li>\n<li>5,764 Visits<\/li>\n<li>9,615 Page views<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what it looked like for the month ended yesterday:<br \/>\n<strong>June 1-June 30, 2008<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>6,242 Visitors<\/li>\n<li>8,308 Visits<\/li>\n<li>14,719 Page views<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those are decent bumps in traffic over 12 months, percentage-wise, and they&#8217;re down about a fifth from the peak local hiking season in April. What happens is: the more I post, the more traffic I get. If I write about things lots of local hikers are interested in &#8212; like where the spring flowers are blooming or which local parks are on fire &#8212; I get more visitors. Also, anything about gear sends a few googlers my way, and they tend to be in a shopping mood, which sends a few paid clicks my way.  <\/p>\n<p>My main preoccupation in June was avoiding the necessity of living in my backpacking tent full-time (cue Homer Simpson voice: &#8220;Lousy industry in free fall&#8221;), so a lot of time that might&#8217;ve been spent blogging was devoted to scoping out more promising sources of income. I have a line on something that I can&#8217;t really talk about in public just yet, but trust me, if somebody throws me a lifeline from the newspaper titanic, they&#8217;ll get full credit here. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m torn between sticking with the Bay Area format and widening the scope to perhaps attract more readers. Local gives the blog a tighter focus, but I feel like I&#8217;ve got the region pretty well hiked out, and truth be told I&#8217;m getting a little weary of seeing the same stuff week in and week out, especially when there&#8217;s such great stuff just a few hours away (though the gas costs to get there are turning into a serious buzz-kill). <\/p>\n<p>Any of your thoughts\/suggestions\/ruminations along these lines are welcome.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first half of &#8217;08 is over, so what the heck, let&#8217;s look at how things are going around here. I shifted to Bay Area coverage around this time last year and installed a Google Analytics counter to measure our&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/2008\/07\/01\/state-of-the-blog-update-2\/\">Read the whole thing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}