Stats Don’t Lie, but Friends Tell the Truth.

What a long strange trip it’s been, my friends. In 2008, thanks to friends Darrell Amy and Corey Smith, I launched ChangeForge.com, a website I like to think offers a “down in the trenches” take on tech and business in the document industry, with a smattering of a few rants and errant opinions along the way.

In that time I have learned a lot about who I am and why I write, as well as just a little of what goes into making a blog successful (with a lot more left to uncover in order to actually do so). But I always like to reflect back on some of the stats to see just what the numbers say as well.

I use a few packages to include StatCounter, Lijit, and Google Analytics to track various aspects of the blog. I am not overly scientific about it, but the data does underscore some interesting observations (3/5/08 – 3/5/09 per Google Analytics):

1. 15,083 unique visits from 12,686 visitors with an average of 1.65 Pages/Visit
2. 24,884 visits with an average time on site of 1 minute 32 seconds.
3. A bounce rate of 69.87% with 84.09% new visits.
4. Referring sites comprised a bulk of my traffic (54.32%), underscoring that I really focused on outreach and building trust and authority with those linking to ChangeForge, but the content probably wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
5. Even though search engines only comprised 25.74% of my overall traffic, I did a decent enough job with search engine optimization (SEO) to see my name ranked 5th on Google out of 12,200,000 results.
6. The ranking and visits came from pouring in a lot of content. I published over 230 articles in the last year, of which 22 were from contributing or guest authors.
7. This rather time-intensive endeavor saw the birthing of several cornerstone articles which have seen very good success in their own right:

• 4 Keys to Success You Need to Survive.
• The Disadvantages of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 as a Document Management System.
• Twitter = Ego; Plurk = Fun.
• SharePoint 2007: Friend or Foe (series).

I dove into the bold new world of social media using services such as Twitter and FriendFeed. Each service offered it’s unique perspective on how to connect with others, and in the end I landed on FriendFeed as the service of choice. Past that, some interesting statistics about each:

Twitter (courtesy of TweetStats):

1. I tweet an average of 7.4 times daily.
2. I sent the most tweets to date in January 2009 topping out at 562 tweets. After that I scaled back my input dramatically.
3. I send more tweets on the weekend and after 8 PM EDT, which come primarily from Friendfeed, twhirl and TweetDeck.

FriendFeed:

1. I am subscribed to over 400 individuals with just about the same number subscribed to me.
2. I have commented 1815 times and liked 1960 times since joining the service.

Several people joined me under the banner ChangeForge such as a real world friend, Jeff Pitney, and a new friend I have made through this website, Max Rosenthal. And I have met so many more along the way to include Greg Walters (Death of a Copier), Ed Crowley (Photizo Group), StrongOne (I still don’t know his real name), Tsudonimh (Know the Network), Ken Allan (Blogger in Middle-earth) who lives on the other side of the world, and Louis Gray who honored me with a writing gig on his team.

Reflections:

In reflection, I find it interesting that I began to look at the statistics less and less. While initially, I thought it crucial to ensure every “I” dotted and “T” crossed, I have allowed the experience to become much more organic. So the statistics might not tell the whole story.

What has surfaced as the most valuable aspect of my experience this past year is not how many uniques I see per month or how many subscribers find their way here, it is about being able to share something with each of you and partake in a thought or two that sharing might spark.

I am so pleased to have realized that statistics may never lie, but friends and community tell the truth. It’s all about you; it’s you that make this effort rewarding, not me, and I would like to say thanks to each of you for your time and trust.

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken is also the founder of Seeking the Son. Ken is always interested in connecting; To discover the many ways you may connect with him, visit him at DandyID.