My 1st Year of Blogging – Retrospective

Abigail Owen Blog – One Year Anniversary!!!

Okay… So first I have to admit that I missed the fact that my 1 year anniversary of starting this blog passed me by on June 20th. So I’m about a month late with this post. But still… one year is a big deal. So I thought it would be fun to look back over the year. Remember that I’m one of those odd ducks who enjoys both words and numbers. And Blogger provides some fun stats. So let’s take a look at what my first year blogging as an author brought:

The Numbers

• 14678 – the total number of views in one year
• I average about 1200 views/month roughly (about 40 views/day).

• I have absolutely no idea of those are good stats or not.
• Peak month – March with almost 3000 views (Right after the “Month of Hyacinth” contests and the release of that book at the end of February – so no surprise there.

The Sources

• “Abigail Owen” is the top search word combination leading to the site.

• Interesting fact – when I first started, searching “Abigail Owen” on Google got you to anything but me. Now when I search, the first full page of results is me. That’s pretty cool.
• Google and Facebook tend to be my biggest sources for people to access the blog. Particularly Google.
• Facebook isn’t much of a shock since I post links to the website/blog all the time.

The Readers

• US is the top country of readers. No surprise there since I’m from the US.
• UK is 3rd – also not a huge surprise as I’ve developed some very loyal readers in that region!
• Ukraine is 2nd and Russia 6th – and this was a bit of a shock.

• If I look at the common sources, I find very random sites written in Russian (so I can’t read them).
• My best guess is that my most popular post – one of my first, written last August titled “In the Home Stretch of Self Publishing”  – made it on to a website there, but I can’t track it down.
• I will admit that I suspect that particular post somehow got onto potentially questionable sites. Since my sales in those countries have definitely not been high. I’m not positive since I can’t read Russian. 🙂 However, if all those hits are legitimate readers of this blog, that’s totally awesome.

The Posts

• 91 posts (averaging 7/month)
• Common topics:

• my experiences with writing/editing/publishing
• teasers for upcoming books
• contests

• Most popular posts:
• In the Homestretch of Self-Publishing (1760 views)
• Storyboarding Book #3 (213 views)
• IPPY Winners Giveaway (206 views)
• Svatura Book #3 – Vote on the Title (196 views)

I hope that was as interesting for you as it was for me. 🙂 Thanks to everyone whose read, enjoyed, responded, and/or supported me in both this blog as well as in my larger self-publishing adventure. I can’t wait to see what the next year will bring!!!