I use Google Analytics to track my web stats as i find it most reliable and best of all FREE! So, the below stats are from March 08 until December 31st 08.

Visits

• 691,878 Visits
• 1,002,373 Pageviews
• 1.45 Pages/Visit
• 515,945 Absolute Unique Visitors

Browsers and Screen config

• Firefox 312,944 (45.23%)
• Internet Explorer 270,309 (39.07%)

Looks like Firefox is gaining or if not already overtaken Internet Explorer in the browser market share. Here’s an interesting one:-

In third place was the Sony Playstation 3, maybe because it’s a Playstation website? It even beat Apple’s Safari. (Playstation 3 40,081 (5.79%))

• 1024×768 174,817 (25.27%)
• 1280×1024 161,160 (23.29%)
• 1280×800 119,074 (17.21%)

Operating System

• Windows 591,923 (85.55%)
• Macintosh 45,935 (6.64%)
• Playstation 3 40,081 (5.79%)

Countries

• United States 288,173
• United Kingdom 108,060
• Canada 49,060

Top Traffic Sources

• n4g.com (referral) 200,777 (29.02%)
• google (organic) 195,018 (28.19%)
• (direct) ((none)) 126,267 (18.25%)

I’m rather happy with the above stats, i’m hoping the year 2009 will take things to the next level. I’m currently looking at a site re-design as i think it needs one.

Talk Playstation has gone a long way in such a short time, the site currently has around 5 authors working on it, they work brilliantly hard to keep the site up to date.

Anyway, lets wait and see what happens.

This is what it looked like:

As you can see there are quite a lot of errors to take care of. I’ve taken care of them all and i’m just waiting for Google to crawl my site again and i’ll take a look at it again when it has.

I think its important to keep an eye in Google Webmaster Tools because it lets you know if there are any conflicting errors with your site and if you iron out all the errors, chances are you could rank a lot higher than you do now.

From 1st July 2008 until 31sth July 2008:

Visitors

• 2,914 Visits (2,716 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 5,162 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 10 (June average: 12)

Bandwidth Transfered: 911.2 Meg

talkplaystation.com

Visitors

• 125,597 (94,808 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 184,678 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 192 (June average: 168)

Bandwidth Transfered: 161.06 Gig

Summary

Daparky.com has pretty much stayed the same with slight increase in visitors not much though. Talk playstation on the other hand has gone up once again from 102,786 visits to 125,597 visits. This time last month the subscriber count was 151, it is now 192. Transfer bandwidth stayed the same.

Lets see what August brings us.

I checked the page ranks this morning and daparky.com is still a page rank 3. I was surprised daparky.com even got a page rank in the last update a good few months ago.

I’m happy to say that talk playstation has a page rank of 4! This is probably due to the amount of incoming links it has (around 12k). Not bad for a blog thats only 4/5 months old.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

From 1st June 2008 until 30th June 2008:

Visitors

• 2,912 Visits (2,747 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 4,840 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 13 (June average: 10)

Bandwidth Transfered: 1004.75 Meg

talkplaystation.com

Visitors

• 102,786 Visits (84,376 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 147,434 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 151 (June average: 87)

Bandwidth Transfered: 161.77 Gig

The stats went up for both sites especially talk playstation with the stats doubling up. The bandwidth talk playstation uses is quite large and my server never went down at all, 100% uptime.

Lets see if we can keep it up for next month.

It will probably go down today though because the keywords were for an update to the playstation network.

At least this will help close down on that souce split i spoke about a month ago. In a months time i will post what the source split currently is but i can say at the moment that the traffic source split is fair and is just what i wanted.

I have set myself some goals for talk playstation and will reveal on July 1 if i’ve met them. I can reveal though that 2 of the 3 goals are ALMOST met.

So i guess you’ll have to check back in on July 1.

So without further ado here are the stats.

daparky.com

From 1st May 2008 until 31st May 2008:

Visitors

• 2,615 Visits (2,381 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 4,268 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 15

Bandwidth Transfered: 869.81 Meg

talkplaystation.com

Visitors

• 61,053 Visits (49,688 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 76,952 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 85

Bandwidth Transfered: 49.76 Gig

Total Bandwidth Transfered: 50.61 Gig

May was a strong month for talk playstation with it reaching new records and heights. I created a custom 404 page and have been looking at a few new templates for it too. Meanwhile daparky.com hasn’t performed as well as i thought – probably because of lack of motivation and May was probably the month with not as many posts.

Key Moments in May 2008

• I asked 6 bloggers a question with regards to advertising etc. Check it out here.
• I’m also enjoying Firefox, it is now my defauly browser. I love it.
• I started to create my own plugin that will allow videos to show in RSS.
• I’ve constantly applied update to talk playstation.
• Daparky.com achieved a page rank of 3

I plan on improving thing even more so check back next month for updated stats.

Well 2 months later i’m starting to see a lot more traffic come from search engine. The split looks like this as of today:

I’m still not happy with it because i want it pretty much even steven. I’m not too fussed about direct traffic, i just want a lot more traffic from the search engines.

I’m going to have to step back and take look and reassess what i can do to make things better in the search engines.

In two months i will make another post similar to this one to see if anything has improved.

It’s quite painful having to copy and paste your details etc into hundreds of differen’t directories but i guess its worth it in the end because you can possibly get free traffic and link backs which is good for page rank.

I’ve another 3 day weekender coming up because its bank holiday on Monday so i’ll most likely be doing some more updates to talk playstation. I already know what i’m going to update, i’m going to update the 404 page or the ‘not found’ page into a more detailed one, a one that looks similar to ProBloggers.

I think this is important because your users can get lost and be put off and basically won’t know where to go and i’ve seen in Google Analytics that users use my search function a lot but what if the search function can’t find anything?

It was Internet World in Earls Court, London and he attended the Google University for Adwords. They gave everyone red Google bags with sweets, pads, pens and mousemats – plus a £50 voucher for Adwords! The talk was about adwords, how to make the most of it, tips and tricks etc.

I have officially replaced the mousemat i used for the new Google one.

So Carey has a few mousemats to spare and he kindly gave me one. To be honest i wouldn’t have minded the £50 voucher for adwords! Maybe i can pursuade him to give me the adwords voucher or even pay £25 for it.

What do you say Carey?

my friends are saying i’m shooting myself in the foot by not running adsense or some form of adverts. I just reply with “i’m concentrating on expanding my readership and getting my name out there before i start putting adverts on”

Do you think i’m doing the right thing or have i really shot myself in the foot? Whats your say on this?

And here are the responses:

ProBlogger

“I personally put ads on my blog from day 1 so that I establish the expectation with readers that I monetize the site and don’t have to change the rules later on. However others do as you do successfully.

this post might help.”

DailyBlogTips

“I think you are doing right. Running ads now would give you pizza money, and it could slow down your growth rate.

Focus on building something big and good for readers first, then once you ve done that you think about how you can make money from it.”

John Chow

“One of the neat thing about the adsense and other networks is the set it and forget it ad serving they provide. Before the ad networks, you would have to sell your own ads and that meant less time to produce content. Now you still have time for content and let them handle the ads.

I don’t see anything wrong with adding some related advertising on the blog. For example, TTZMedia.com offers real time banners that can show prices for Playstation and Playstation games. Readers may see that more of a service than an ad.”

Smemon

“Yeah it’s always a catch 22 situation… ads can drive away potential subscribers but at the same time without revenue, you can’t be expected to keep a site afloat.

It’s always best to run a site at a loss and claim moral high ground rather than slap ads all over it claiming they’ll pay for the server. Loyal subscribers and readers are essential as these are the guys who will be promoting your site, commenting on it, linking to it etc… at some stage. But that’s my own opinion.

Having said that, many people expect ads on a site, so i reckon you could get away with one or two ads without pissing people off.

I think you could have two ad slots on that site, one skyscraper/square in the sidebar and one banner after the first post. If it were me, i would NOT place an ad before the first post, especially when the site is only starting out. That’s the first thing people will see and it’s a big turn off.

But seen as you’re traffic is booming you should definitely introduce some sort of advertising even if it just to have the site ‘break even’… server costs, domain, time spent on it etc… you could bank that much and then create a prize fund out of the remainder – that way you’re giving back to the community and taking the limelight off yourself”

Carey

Well, Carey works in the same building as me so i walked to his office to ask him the question face to face. He basically told me that running affiliates would work well. For example if i was talking about a named game i could have a link to amazon to buy this game. He also showed me some nice affiliate management websites which i will look into.

Shoemoney

No response yet.

Overall thank you for all replying to me and helping me out. It’s nice to get help from the big boys out there. I will certainly go over the answers in great detail and see which one will work for me the most.

TalkPlaystation has a page rank of 0 but that blog is newer than this one, i already have plenty of backlinks to talkplaystation.

A lot of people say you shouldn’t care about page rank and concentrate on building a better blog, but because i’m a new blogger it’s pretty exciting news.

I await the next page rank update.

This is pretty good because there needs to be another search engine that is as quick as Google.

This is good because if you want to get some traffic quickly and have some good news to post you can take this quick indexing method to get a good head start on things. An example of this is smemon’s post on the eduardo injury that happened a couple of months ago.

This is a good tactic for any blogger who wishes to seek out search engine traffic.

I’ve got talkplaystation.com to a point where i don’t have to keep an eye on indexing because i know it will index. Although i’m not receiving great traffic through search engines for talkplaystation, it’s going up day by day though. I need to improve in this area and get more search engine traffic. I will be focusing on this next week.

I’ve checked different country versions of Google and i don’t rank as well as Google.com, probably because my hosting company is in America and Google thinks my site is American? This doesn’t bother me too much to be honest.

The list below shows where i rank for David Parkinson…

• Google.com = Rank 5
• Google.co.uk = Page 3
• Google.ie = Rank 4
• Yahoo = Got to page 6 and gave up

When i started this blog i was checking Google.com for my name and ranked in at around page 7. After a few weeks i was on page 5 for a while then went to page 2, and now i’m on page 1 rank 5 which is pretty good for a blog 3 months old.