Enter Venture Visitors

July 4th, 2008 | By Patrick

Yesterday, no one visited this site.

I had actually been waiting for that as a type of milestone. The last time no one visited the site for an entire day was May 10th. I kept writing and watching my visitor statistics in order to keep myself out of the red. I wanted to see how long I could keep the streak going. 113 days later, I’m happy with the results.

I started this blog on April 16th and have been tracking my visitors and subscribers ever since. (On June 9th, I added both Feedburner stats and WordPress stats. For the next Enter Venture stats update, I’ll have more data to compare all three.)

In my Enter Venture Update post from June 9th, I mentioned the most popular posts up to that time:

  1. Columbia Venture Community
  2. Dealing with Constraints
  3. Back up, what the feed are you talking about?

Now, the most popular posts, not including pre-June 9th data, are:

  1. Two Ideas for the NY Startup Scene
  2. NY Video 2.0
  3. Columbia Venture Community
  4. Mashable Exhibit Hall – NY Internet Week
  5. The value of engineering education

I’ve noticed two popular trends for the blog — events and ideas. Events bring tend to bring in the most traffic, but it’s more fickle. People go to an event, read about the event, and then the event passes on. Ideas tend to bring in lasting users, users that subscribe, users that comment.

Going back to one of my earliest posts, What this blog will be about, the one thing that hasn’t seemed to break the popular posts lists are my book posts (actually, these updates haven’t either). I think this is a case when I’m going to ignore my users though. I like those book posts and hope that they’ll become a better resource when I’ve compiled a bigger, more comprehensive list for early web entrepreneurs.

Check out some of the other things I’ve learned about my readers over the past few months:

Geography:

  • 86% US (Largely NY, California, and Massachusetts)
  • 3.8% India (Mostly from Hyderabad — what’s up guys?)
  • 1.67% Canada
  • < 1% from 23 others (significant time spent by users from Germany, Sweden, and Taiwan)

Referred by sites:

  • 47% Direct traffic
  • 24% Google referrals
  • 6% Gmail referrals
  • 3% Read Write Web referral

Using the following browsers:

  • 62% Firefox
  • 24% Internet Explorer
  • 14% Safari

Much can be learned from these few tidbits about how I’m gaining traffic, what my users are like, and where they’re coming from. Stay tuned for future Enter Venture developments that will address what I’m going to do with this information. The first goal was to simply get people reading this blog. Next, I’m going to focus on how to grow Enter Venture.

Enjoy your 4th of July.

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