Rotheblog hits 20,000+ visitors!

I wasn’t sure if Rotheblog.com – Arcade game blog would ever reach 20,000 visitors. As I monitored traffic in June I thought that it might be possible by the end of the year, but I didn’t figure Rotheblog.com would double it’s traffic only two months later.

Google Analytics Traffic July 2008AwStats Traffic July 2008

As I mentioned before, website traffic statistic softwares are inaccurate. I tend to trust Google just because they seem to align with my own contextual evaluations. If I went by what AwStats was saying, I would be under the delusion that my site gets anywhere from 8,000 to 21,000 unique visitors a day. In the last two weeks I have found a Firefox plugin called Alexa Sparky that helps evaluate traffic between websites and takes some of the mystery out of web traffic. This plugin sits in the toolbar on the lower right of the browser and gives a graph of traffic trends drawing on the index from Alex.com.

Alexa Plugin Screenshot

You can use that ranking to get a general idea of how your competing interest websites, for me arcade game websites, compare to your traffic and incoming links. Here is a screenshot that compares Rotheblog.com arcade blog vs. the likes of the BYOAC forums, the Klov forums, Klov.com and Retroblast.

Alexa Traffic July 2008

If you can see the colors and the corresponding results, Rotheblog has quickly crept up to the traffic level of the Klov forums and is now hovering at the traffic levels of Klov.com and BYOAC. That is pretty exciting for me.

Other traffic sources for the past two months

Over the last two months I had some great success using Stumble Upon, but you have to find a fairly mainstream article. That article was my artwork comparison for the Ms. Pac-man control panel overlays by Two Bits. In one day I saw my traffic increase nearly 500%!

I also have mixed feelings about the results of publishing a free WordPress Theme. Last month I release the free arcade geared Atari Command WordPress theme, and after cross promotion saw an increase of 200 visitors a day to my website. When looking at proportions, it was decent, but definitely didn’t weigh out the work involved in designing and releasing a free theme. I am curious to know if each subsequent theme would maintain those increases, my guess is that it wouldn’t. But the most encouraging thing is that WordPress has such a strong user base (hundreds of thousands 2 million WordPress users according to Matt M. the developer who founded WordPress) that even a niche theme for arcade game blogs got a lot of interest, just reinforcing the power of great open source software when backed by a community.

However, I will admit that some of my recent traffic is probably due to the great interest in the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. A spectacular movie, I have seen traffic increase last week as the anticipation for release was white hot. I always thought, “Gosh, there sure are a lot of blog / websites out there that are dedicated to movie news, they can’t all be prosperous can they?” Now I have my answer.

The best part of having the additional traffic are the natural side effects. I get a ton of traffic asking about a number of different things from the games and parts I have for sale to if I know a collector looking for ‘x’ arcade machine. I also can direct new visitors to well known arcade websites like QuarterArcade.com when I get breaking news of warehouse raids, or new quality arcade products like the aluminum etched arcade game keychains from Brian Jones.

Thank you to the arcade game community

As always I want to thank my viewers for their participation and their contributions. I am constantly searching out new and fresh content, from simple tutorials on how to apply black vinyl to the front of a Centipede cab to more specific information on custom fixes for your Space Invaders game, I rely on the community to feed this website. Please do contribute something, I only turn things away if it is news that has been covered in the forums that doesn’t allow for additional insights.

30,000 viewers at this arcade game blog? At my current traffic click it is possible, and once my hell weeks of finals finish up here I plan on having some very cool articles that I have been picking at when I have time that I think everyone will like.

Here are some similar arcade posts

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Comments
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Congratulations Jeff. Those numbers are very impressive. I still haven’t found a stats package that I’m entirely happy with and the results seem to vary so much between the packages that it’s hard to tell which is the most accurate. Like you, I tend to put most of my stock in Google Analytics. Regardless, keep up the good work and keep the informative articles coming.

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congrats impresive, most impresive

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There is some controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior. If you look at fortunehotels.in Alexa’s user base is a fair statistical sample of the internet user population, Alexa’s ranking should be quite accurate.

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Congrats! I know I love reading your blog.

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