Last Monday I promised that this week I’d give an overview of the performance of the RBDRodeo blog, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do now.

This blog launched on June 6th of 2007, so it’s been live for close to 7 months now. In that time, between all of us here we’ve managed to put out 126 posts (this is no. 127), which comes out to just under one for every business day since the site’s been live (work does sometimes get in the way). Those 126 posts have received a total of 130 comments. Not bad, but we’d always love to hear more about what people think about our posts / suggestions for topics that you’d like to see covered. Oh, and our comment spam software blocked 1,257 spam comments, which just goes to show that you must have spam protection set up on your blog.

What were the most visited posts for the year?

1. Google Grants Enforces Spending Cap 11.4% of all blog traffic
2. SES Chicago - Dealing with Difficult Clients 5.17%
3. SMX London - Cutting Edge Linking Tactics 4.98%
4. Google Grants Application Process for NonProfits 4.87

So that shows that people like it when we write about Google Grants, and when we do conference session recaps. Hmm, maybe Nan should give a presentation on Google Grants at SES New York and I’ll write it up…

What did we write about? Well, analyzing the categories that we’ve assigned posts to, we can see that this blog primarily talks about:

1. Non-Profits - 38 posts
2. Social Marketing - 37 posts
3. Education and Training - 34 posts
4. SEO - 31 posts
5. Reputation Management - 26 posts

Which are the topics that I would expect to see showing as those that we focus on. For 2008 I would expect to see Analytics make a big push into the top 5 as our newest team member Joy Brazelle writes more about her tips and insights for Analytics
Where did our traffic come from?

1. StumbleUpon 38.21% of all traffic to the blog
2. Google (organic) 19.61%
3. Direct 14.42%
4. SearchEngineLand 2.46%
5. Sphinn 2.38%

All in all there were 233 different sources of traffic that we logged, with Yahoo not showing up until 9th, which actually placed it below the green social network Hugg.com.

What about the keyword that people used to find us?

1. rbdrodeo
2. rbd
3. paypal nonprofit
4. youtube berlin
5. political emails

What about some of the lower traffic but more interesting terms that people used to find us?

• Causes of Shame
• butter knife
• chunnel
• chicago sports pro bono
• escape route through Berlin Wall

Thankfully the Berlin Wall has been torn down, so we don’t have to feel bad about someone attempting to get from the FDR to the West via this blog.

Speaking of Germany, where did our visitors come from? Well we had visitors to the site from 112 countries; the no.1 country for visits is rather obvious, and as you’ll see the top 4 are all native English speaking countries, with Ireland showing up in 11th behind 6 non-native speaking countries.

1. USA
2. UK
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. India
6. Germany
7. Italy
8. Holland (Netherlands)
9. France
10. Romania

So that’s the old, what about the new? Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed that the name of the blog has changed, it’s no longer RBDRodeo, it’s now EndlessPlain.com. Why have we done this? Well, it’s all to do with the rebranding that Nan announced a few weeks ago. As of Jan 1st 2008 the RBDRodeo team will work for Serengeti Communications. As you can imagine, Serengeti and Rodeo’s don’t fit well thematically, but the concept of the Endless Plain works well with the new name. We’re going to keep talking on this blog about issues that we think are interesting for our audience, and that will help you navigate the endless plain of your digital marketing strategy. Why is it endless? Your marketing effort doesn’t have a final destination, but it does need to have direction, and we aim to guide you in the right direction towards higher ROIs and better and bigger things for your company / nonprofit.

So thanks for reading this blog in 2007, and we’ll look for you in 2008.

Filed under: Administration, Agency, Analytics on Monday, December 31st, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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