Monthly Review: September 2014

This is the second monthly review report. The previous one was the August Monthly Review.

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The month of September began where August left off. Whereas August had a twice weekly publication schedule (Monday’s and Thursday’s), the introduction of the previous month’s report enabled me at the start of September to have a pipeline of content through to the middle of the month in spite of moving to a three times a week schedule (Saturday’s). Thus a new tradition has become part of XBOP: the first post of the month will always be a monthly review.

September has seen the trend of visitors to XBOP continue to grow. The main reason behind this would appear to be the use of tags – which are now detected by search engines and as a result helping to return XBOP posts in the various search results. The increase in visitors was the only positive metric this month, highlighting just how high the bar had been raised to for August..

The implementation of tags in all posts, including all existing articles has definitely led to a more accurate indexation of XBOP by search engines like Google. This is search engine optimization (SEO) at its basic form. Interestingly, the number of spam comments promoting SEO has fallen away, so maybe those comments are triggered by the detection – or lack thereof – of post and page tags.

The introduction of tags also is reflected in the Topics view on the home page, where it is now derived from both categories and tags.

The month of September has been a solid month of posting three times a week, resulting in a total of 15 posts for the month. This regular thrice a week cycle is also a discipline for me not to disrupt – the only exceptions have been to tap into time-sensitive articles. The three day publishing regime has also meant that if I generated content too quickly it would not be as up-to-date given the future publication date.

The top viewed article for September was ProPresenter + OS X Yosemite = ? with a daily viewing of 4 hits contributing to a total of 105 for the month. This strong performance also makes it one of the top views across the website for the year.

After August being a record month, September has indeed followed my prediction of not being able to top it, but importantly the month still came second overall in terms of 264 visitors. One interesting statistic that emerged was the rise of Brazil as a new location of visitors. The US continues to be a key source, and there is a high likelihood that it is US users of ProPresenter driving this traffic.