The Stick Turns 4!

I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for 4 years…and that after 4 years….I still have things to say. 🙂

Last week while working with 5th Graders on their blogs and talking about blogging one students asked, “How’d you get to be famous?”

I love 5th Graders!

My answer: You have to write something that people want to read, and the more you write the more Google finds you and the more people read you. But first…you have to write something that people want to read.

Of course I could have gone into niche markets and finding a way to blog about something that someone else will want to read, but I figure students have a built in niche of other students. The book reviews that 5th graders write will show up on Google and other 5th graders might just find their content. Crazier things have happened.

So to celebrate The Sticks 4th Anniversary I thought I’d share some stats that just blow me away.

According to Google Analytics:
From September 19th, 2008 to September 18th 2009
There were some 69,517 Visitors to the blog viewing some 103,617 pages and new visitors made up 79.33% of all viewers. Absolute Unique Visitors was 55,469.

45.38% of viewers came from Search Engines while 32.49% came from referring sites (RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and 22.13% direct traffic to the site.

The most interesting of all the figures to me is this year Twitter beat out all RSS readers as the #1 referring site to the blog with 13.62%. Twitter truly is the new RSS Reader. That or there are so many different RSS readers that they split the rest of the views. Google Reader and Netvibes were the top two RSS Readers.

The most viewed blog posts of the past year:

Interview Questions for International School Job Fairs

Evaluating Technology Use in the Classroom

Pre-Paid Data Plan on an Unlocked iPhone

Google Calendar Sync with Palm

Stages of PLN Adoption

Also this is the first year I’ve had Google Adsense on the site to try and off set some of the cost of hosting this and the other 4 sites that I run. This year I made $98.04 to help offset the cost which run me approximately $200 a year. So I’ll make back about 50% of my costs….not to bad for just a couple of little ads here and there.

Earlier this month the blog saw it’s 4000th FeedBurner subscriber which just blows my mind and with the 4800+ crazy Twitter Followers I’m just in awe.

So those are the numbers behind the content. Of course the content is really where the story is told. In the comments and e-mails that I get when I put my thinking out there no matter how mundane or controversial it might be. Each post has taught me something, either in the simple matter of thinking it through as I put my thoughts down, or on the numerous comments that have made up the conversations that are this blog. I thank you for reading and hope that this year of blogging adds value to the body of knowledge that we call the Internet!