The Sixth Month
Namaste Internet!
It’s official. Build Internet is officially half a year old. This is a big milestone, and we’re terribly excited with how everything has gone so far. For this month in review, we’ll take a look at some number from May, and then some notable year-to-date figures.
Hold on tight! With a half year down, this is going to be a longer-than-usual review of the milestone.
Our Recent Hiatus
As many have noticed, the activity on this blog has taken a sudden dip over the past couple weeks. If this has started to upset you (missing us is perfectly normal), we’d like to assure you this is not a trend. Even though this college year has ended, we’ve still got a few loose ends to work with before fully embracing summer. Those loose ends? Incoming freshmen.
We’ve been on a hiatus for a bit while helping run orientation at our school. The schedule of shuffling freshmen through the paces has taken a big toll on our availability for making new posts. Don’t worry, we’ll be done on June 10th and be returning to our new office with a bang.
I’ll be honest though. These two-and-a-half weeks off from regular posting has kept the month’s growth at a minimum. Still, it was an interesting thing to see how well the blog performed on autopilot. You’ll see the full effect of what I mean in the next section.
Traffic and Stats
This month was right on par with April’s numbers, which isn’t bad considering we were only truly actively posting for half the time.
Daily traffic was from a variety of referrers.
The quest for visitors from Greenland continues. We’ve remained steady with a reach to about 170 countries around the world. The top three are the U.S.A, United Kingdom, and Germany.
Once again, you can grab a more complete month summary from Google Analytics via the link below.
Top Posts and Content
Here’s a look at the most visited posts of May 2009. You’ll notice that there has been little change from last month’s hot posts.
- How to Make a Smooth Animated Menu with jQuery
- Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery
- How to Make a Smooth Animated Menu with jQuery
- Supersized 2.0 Released – Now with Transitions & Controls
- Changing Form Input Styles on Focus with jQuery
Subscribers and Followers
Once again, our hiatus had a slowing effect on RSS subscriber growth. According to Feedburner, Build Internet currently has around 2700 subscribers, which is an increase of about 300 from last month. If you’re just joining us on the team of regular readership, thanks! If you’re still on the fence, here’s a helpful link to our feed. I’m sure you’ll do the right thing from there.
Our Twitter followers had a second explosive month of growth after having almost doubled to 1700. It’s been interesting to see the number of referrals from Twitter growing steadily each month.
Build Internet’s Technorati rank (through all the downtime) took a modest dip to just under the top 12K blogs. With luck, we’ll get the “Top 10K” badge in this month!
Dollar by Dollar
Adsense has started to pick up once again, but we still wouldn’t call it a success just yet. On the other hand, BuySellAds has been absolutely wonderful in bringing in a steady stream of advertisers. We’re toying with the idea of raising our CPM on some major ad placements on the blog. We’ll let you know how it goes.
Year to Date Traffic
Six months is a long time in the blogging world. Here’s a look at some of the key totals from Build Internet’s half-year traffic. All of the charts below reflect numbers gathered from the start of December until the end of May 2009.
Looking these numbers, we’re starting to see a very encouraging long tail climb. With well over half a million pageviews in the first half year, we’re on track to surpass one million in the coming two to three months… and that’s a huge milestone.
Guest Authors
Because of our busy schedule lately, we’ve been incredibly happy to post two wonderful guest posts this month. The first of which came from Dixon Crews, where he wrote a tutorial for setting up a local development environment.
The second of our May guest posts was sent in from Stuart Thursby of Thoughts on Type. His post covered the value of working on personal projects that had real results and timelines.
So far, both of these have been incredibly well-received by the web niche. If you’re interested in joining the ranks of “guest author on Build Internet”, head over to the announcement post for more on how you can get involved in teaching others about good internet.
One Mighty Roar Gets an Office
This month we started to rent out an office space for the summer (and hopefully beyond).
For all you loyal readers out there, here’s a teaser; the shot below was taken during the midst of renovations. When we move in for good in a week, you’ll be the first to get a tour of the completed setup.
Here’s a Thank You
The first sixth months has gotten incredibly far from where this blog started as a humble addition to an already comprehensive web niche. I’m convinced that what’s allowed Build Internet to grow as it is has been the continued support of an absolutely wonderful readership.
So consider this a very heartfelt thank you. Here’s hoping the next six months will treat us just as well!
Keep on internet-ing,
Zach & Sam Dunn
