Well the results are in. You may remember that following a competition set by my coach and mentor Alex Jeffreys I set myself the challenge of getting 2009 visitors to my blog by the start of the new year.

This challenge began on the morning of 19th December 2008 when I posted a screenshot of the current state of visitors at that time. You may want to refresh your memory by checking out that post?

Anyway, here’s the same screenshot taken this morning…

You can see that I’ve added an arrow to show the challenge start date. The big peak is when I launched my Christmas gift giveaway, which worked well and created a surge of traffic. You can also see that after the peak my daily traffic has risen consistently. I’m hoping this will continue into the future.

So the final tally according to Google Analytics is 883 visits, which if I take away the 170 visits I began with, leaves a total of 713 visits. Now if you read one of my previous posts you’ll know that I’m deeply suspicious of the accuracy of these results. Simply because of the feedback and comments I’ve been receiving I know that there has been more traffic than this.

So lets take a look at my server logs for the period…

And here are the actual numbers…

OK, so using the results from the server log table above I received a total of 2,841 visits during the challenge period.

WooHoo! I think you know which results I’m going to believe. I actually did it – I beat the challenge. I am really stoked.

If you visited this blog during my challenge then I want to thank you so much for helping me achieve this target and more. You’re great!

Make sure you come back here soon, because I’m gonna to tell you exactly what I did to achieve this.

Until then – be successful

Technorati Tags: blog challenge, blog promotion, blog traffic, blog visitors, blogging

Well I’ve been persevering with the same methods I started out with; blog commenting, submitting articles, and frequenting twitter. This approach has definitely seen an increase in visitors to my blog. But not as great an increase as I had hoped for; or has it?

You see, I can track visitors to the site in any of 3 ways and this has thrown up some anomalies.

My 3 tracking methods are…

• Server logs
• Google Analytics, and
• Feedburner

My web host provides Webalizer server stats in my cpanel which show me discrete visitors to this domain. I have the latest version of the ‘Ultimate Google Analytics’ plugin that is supposed to track visits and distinct visitors through the Google Analytics interface. And finally, as I have a feedburner RSS feed subscription box at the top of my sidebar I have activated tracking in my Feedburner admin panel.

You would think that these would leave no room for error in determining how I’m doing with my challenge. Well you would wouldn’t you?

The trouble is none of them seem to agree with each other. Just taking the last 4 days for example. Google reports twice as many visitors as feedburner, whilst my server logs report over 4 times as many visitors as Google.

So here is my dilema – can Feedburner or Google Analytics be trusted to provide accurate stats? I fear not!

If you’re tracking visits using Google Analytics then please compare them to the visits reported by your server logs and let me know what you find. And if you’re an Analytics wiz then perhaps you can comment here and let me know what you think is going on.

My server logs tell me it’s going to be a close run thing to achieve my challenge. But I’ll do my best to get a last spurt of new visitors to the site before we see the new year.

Watch this space!

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: blog challenge, blog traffic, blog visitors, blogging