August has just wrapped up and it looks like it was another one for the books when it comes to new email subscribers – a new all time record. Other than that, not to much has changed, so this will be a short one.
Overall Traffic
Let’s start with overall traffic – which has been almost identical to the previous month. Seriously – almost to a T.
The stats are also unchanged compared to June:
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is again very similar to the previous month – no big news here:
Email Subscribers
As I said – the growth of the Baeldung email list is where it was at in August – a ~9% increase with no new traffic, for a total of 1279 new email subscribers.
Looks like my new experiments are helping my overall conversion rate.
Wrap-Up
Of course – the 100% plus gains of last year and long gone – all the low hanging fruit have been thoroughly picked. That being said, I still think there’s a lot of room for growth, and I’m shooting for a consistent 1500+ new subscribers a month with this level of traffic. That does take constant work though – tweaking working strategies and testing out new ones.
Also, the fact is that any optin CTA, no matter how solid, will decrease over time – that’s just the cost of doing business. So, old strategies do need to be refreshed from time to time, just to combat the effect of time.
All in all a solid month – looking forward for September.
Hmm, interesting data, thanks a lot for sharing!
Looks like our reach from the jOOQ blog is quite substantial in your referral section. Not only did we make it to #9, I suspect that a significant amount of traffic from java.dzone.com and javacodegeeks.com are also our syndicated content, mostly from the Java 8 Friday series. Is that correct?
Are you syndicating your content as well? Would be really interesting to learn about how you analyse your own experience with respect to syndication.
Hey Lukas – yeah, your blog is a great referrer – the traffic is mature and well targeted, which is great. So – on the syndication of content – it’s a mixed bag. For the first 2 years after launching my blog – I was syndicating every article (that’s where that traffic is coming from). The problem I saw was that Google was considering that version of the article more authoritative than my own. It knew it wasn’t the original (publish date, back link) but still – it was showing that version in a lot of searches rather than mine.… Read more »
Yes, this can happen some times. But in-article links are syndicated as they are, so chances are that in the long run, you’ll still profit from the syndication.
Also, you’ll reach an audience that you might not reach otherwise. For instance, a recent syndication with JavaWorld brought tons of new traffic. Much more than all other syndicators combined – simply because my own name (as a blogger) and the jOOQ brand name were unknown thus far to their audience…
There’s definitely truth in that, but let’s look at it closely. First – let me clarify something – let’s say Google decides that your version and the version over on Dzone (for example) are the same, and that they want to server the Dzone version over yours. At that point, if the Dzone version is number 5 in the SERP, yours won’t be number 6 – it will be gone entirely (because it would be seen as a duplicate). Now – and this is just my own personal experience – the traffic that will come out of Dzone for that… Read more »
Yeah, well it’s hard to say…
It’s really just guess work when it comes to what Google does.