David Pitlyuk

Traffic

Traffic has definitely been on the decline for this blog, and this month was no different. I’m still getting a decent amount, but it has been going down. I’m not very concerned about this because I know things I can do to increase traffic, and much of it is coming from Google Images in the first place. I need to work on getting more non-Google traffic. Take a look at the number of uniques and pageviews over the course of this blog life:

We can see that over time the traffic has been decreasing, but there will always be ups and downs.  I’ve been talking about a new design forever, and things keep coming up that delays that.  I really want to put an emphasis on building traffic, but I’m also half tempted to wait on going full force until I’m ready with the new look.  I also understand that design is not everything, but it’s a personal decision I am making.  I’m now hoping to have it launched between the end of January/beginning of February.  Or maybe I’ll try and get it launched for the new year, but that would deviate from a plan I have.  We’ll see, stay tuned

Monetization

Last month I mentioned that I had something unique and unexpected that brought in some revenue for the blog. I had a request for a company that wanted to purchase the rights to an image in order to use it as a backdrop for a trade show booth. I totally did not expect anything like that, and I ended up selling the rights for $300. It may have been the easiest $300 I’ve ever made. On top of that, I did my first private ad sale (and you’ll see more of that in November), for a big increase in revenue:

Text Link Ads: $6.92
Kontera: Kontera was removed from the site for now, so I will no longer be pulling money in from this.
AdSense: $11.74
Private Ad Sales: $225

Total: $243.66

Not much new going on here besides the $225 in private ad sales that I mentioned last month.  Until I start increasing the percentage of traffic away from Google Images, I can’t see these numbers growing too rapidly.  AdSense was only located on the homepage and the bottom of each post.  I just added a 468×60 bar to the top of single post pages, so I do see those numbers increasing this month.
RSS Subscribers

RSS subscribers have remained steady, so there is no major news to report here.  In the charts we can see two days of downtime from Feedburner.  We can also see a slight dip in the middle of the month, and then a slight jump back up to the 100 level.

Search Engine Goodness

The last two months have shown a good 20% decrease in search engine traffic.  This month it dropped some more, but only 6%.  Is this a sign of some leveling off?

Lets take a look and see which keywords were used most to find my blog last month:

1. e92 m3
2. virginia mansions
3. texas de brazil coupon
4. chima steakhouse tysons corner
5. mansions in virginia
6. blog title ideas
7. chima tysons corner
8. www.davidpitlyck.com
9. best corporate websites
10. chima tysons
11. northern virginia mansions

That’s the 2nd time #8 davidpitlyck.com made the list.  For those of you that don’t know, you can just go to DavePit.com if you don’t want to worry about trying to spell my name   e92 m3 continues to top the list.

Popular Pages/Content

Here was the most popular content in November:

1. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
2. April (Month)
3. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs:H-O
4. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
5. Cars (Category)
6. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
7. Off Topic (Category)
8. Picture gallery of mansions in Northern Virginia Part 1
9. New Virginia Civil Fee For Traffic Tickets Is Nuts
10. A Raunchy Dora The Explorer

Top Referrals

Here’s a list of the top referrals that do not include search engines:

1. StumbleUpon
2. tnmedia.nl
3. Nevblog
4. Naver
5. Technorati
6. Delicious
7. Facebook
8. Smashing Magazine
9. Sanalkurs.net
10. TimeForBlogging