Lakaw is a journey is a step is a move. I love to travel around the world and this is my travel and travel gadget site. Welcome and Enjoy!

What makes a blogger happy?

2 comments | Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Today is one big day for a blogger like me. This blog, yes, my other blog, has been cited in one of the articles of the Philippine Daily Inquirer Online's Infotech news section. It linked to a post I made a couple of days ago.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer is the leading newspaper in the Philippines. Its online edition receives millions of hits a day. So, for a common blogger like me, getting a citation from the daily paper is more than enough to send me running to a bar for a big celebration.

I monitor the daily traffic for all my sites. My Composed Gentleman blog would average to about 1200 hits a day. Sometimes it can be over that. This site, however, gets only about a hundred or so since this was recently (re)launched (about a couple of months ago).

At around 8PM, U.S. time (10AM Philippine equivalent), I noticed a hit or two coming from the Inquirer's site. I didn't mind it the first time since, in most cases, I get referrers from other sites, hmmm, each referrer generating few hits.

So I checked the number of visits at 8PM and was satisfied for the 1500 hits. Two hours later, lalalala, it doubled. Wowowee!!! The cause? The Philippine Daily Inquirer as the referring source. Here is a traffic data (notice the 3435 visits) from my sitemeter.com account.

I checked my other tracking account. Google Analytics is more detailed when it comes to tracking visitors and referring sources. It also gives marketing strategies and keywords I could use to optimize my blog. Here are the top sources for the last few hours.

* [organic] indicates visitors referred by an unpaid search engine listing.
* [referral] indicates visitors referred by links which were not tagged with any campaign variables.
* (direct)[(none)] indicates visitors who visited the site by typing the URL directly into the browser.

Google Analytics also tells which referrals drive the highest quality traffic? It lists non-campaign activity coming via referrals from other websites. This is useful for tracking links that I don't have or cannot control. See the inquirer links?