I want to try something new, something that I’m calling the “Monthly Roundup”. These will be monthly posts capturing what’s been added and updated on the site, what I’m working on and an analysis of my traffic. The most important part of these roundups is to bring newer visitors up to speed on the goings-on, set personal goals for myself and most importantly get your feedback on what you thought of the past month.
Let’s get started
August 2012
August proved to be a busy month for me. I work a 9-5 job and have a few other hobbies besides ADayTrip.com that like to gobble up my time. Speaking of eating up free time, have you played Guild Wars 2 yet? Wow, you won’t sleep for a week; it’s a great game.
I managed to crank out 7 new pages of content as well as finally creating a Youtube channel and uploading 5 videos that I’ve been sitting on for a while.
The most time consuming part of creating new content is sorting through the pictures, believe it or not. On top of that, every time I create a day trip or blog post in a new town, I need to create a town page for it. Right now, creating these pages eats up a lot of time but I feel it will be worth the effort in the end. In addition to the new pages, I also revisited Goosewing Beach and added some more pictures.
In case you missed it, August write ups can be found in the archive here.
Goals Revisited
It’s been about 4 months since I wrote about finishing version 1.0 of this site. I set a lot of ambitious goals for myself and I haven’t achieved all of them. It always seems like there’s 100 things I should be doing for this site, the work is never ending. I did manage to create a social networking presence though and if you check out the “Follow Us!” box in the top left, you can find me on your favorite social sites. Feel free to follow me ;)!
I am currently working on a few, new day trips to Bridgewater, MA and to Abington, MA. I have the pictures and I have the notes and will be assembling them in a few days, so stay tuned.
Beyond that, I am gearing up for Halloween! Halloween is a favorite of mine. I plan on writing a few articles to spruce up your spooky season, expect those closer to October though.
Traffic Review
I’m happy to report that traffic this month has been climbing steadily.
The niche event round up articles I write produce a huge jump up in traffic, however it’s only a one time surge around the event and then the traffic disappears.
Back in the beginning of August, I wrote two Labor Day weekend event posts. I wrote one for Massachusetts and one for Rhode Island. I expected these posts to cause a steadily increasing flow of traffic throughout the entire month. Surprisingly, this didn’t happen. It wasn’t until August 26th that I began to see an influx of Labor Day traffic.
However, at the start of Labor Day weekend, August 31st, I saw a huge spike in traffic. Between these posts and the Fourth of July posts I did the month before, it seems that the earliest people begin to search out events for a particular holiday is the day before the event. In the future, I think posting these event/holiday roundups one week prior to the holiday date is early enough to be helpful to my readers but late enough that it won’t get lost in the search engine shuffle.
With regards to day trip writeups, Goosewing Beach continues to draw in the most traffic. Which is awesome, because that happens to be my favorite one so far. Which is your favorite? What would you like to see more of?
Sadly, I think the end of summer will impact future traffic. A lot of the write ups involve beaches or fair-weather, outdoor activities. Late fall and winter will be tough seasons to cover as people tend to hibernate instead of enjoy the outdoors. What do you do to pass the time during the cold winter days?
Take care and see you next post!
-Craig
Leave a Reply