This site went live on the 4th of May, 2007. It is exactly a month old today, so I decided to do a little recap of the month that was. I plan to to make this a regular feature because it helps me keep track of my progress, and also allows me to link back to and thank some people who have helped me along the way.
Traffic
As you can see in the graph below, I had very little traffic to begin with. This was carried over from my static site that existed in this same space. That traffic was largely driven by links on sites I had designed for clients and also signature links from my participation in forums (mostly BlenderArtists). The traffic then was usually only a few hundred page-views a month. Almost non-existent in the larger scheme of things, but then my original site was really meant to be more of a showcase for clients who needed proof that I could do all those things they needed me to do for them. It was adequate for the purpose.
This month the growth above that original level of traffic was stratospheric, and it was all because of the Problogger Top 5 group writing project (discussed below). Traffic figures for SamirBharadwaj.com in May 2007 were:
Total Pages — 275100
Total Visits — 64736
That is quite literally a hundred times what I used to get on my old static site (which I never really marketed anyway). So all in all, I am extremely pleased with this initial boost during the first month of this site’s existence.
The Problogger Top 5 Group Writing Project
I have been an occasional visitor at Problogger.net for many months now, because the plan to create a more comprehensive site with a blog has been swimming around in my head for a long time, and Problogger is an excellent source of information and ideas about blogging. I came upon the group writing project on one of my random visits, a few days after starting this blog. It was already a day into the project and I didn’t have much time, but I did want to do something significant rather than some arbitrary listing. Keeping that in mind I came up with the idea of photography tips. Once again, I wanted to make the article special, so I decided to take some special shots to illustrate the piece. I managed to finish all this just in time for the deadline, and the result was Top 5 Tricks for Taking Professional Looking Photographs with your Digital Camera
My article was linked in the Day 4 listing and also in the final listing on Problogger and after a quiet day or two a flood of visitors arrived peaking at 28,000 page views on the 14th. After that there was a decline to more steady levels of traffic but still a healthy flow. Most of this came through people publishing the list of Top 5 posts on their own blogs, which resulted in some social bookmarking activity. I was lucky that some people singled out my post and decided to recommend it specifically. That lead to minor levels of Digg and Del.icio.us traffic and a flood of Stumbleupon traffic. Stumbleupon is still sending a steady stream of traffic to my site through this post.
So, a big Thank You to Darren Rowse of Problogger and all those kind people who linked to me for getting me started on this blog with a bang rather than a whimper.
Blog Carnivals
While I highly appreciated the sudden burst of traffic to my photography tricks post, I did know that I would have to do enough marketing to create some sustained traffic to this site. The major step in that direction during this first month was participating in Blog Carnivals. I submitted some of my more interesting posts to some carnivals and was actually included in a few. Here is a list below:
ToDo
That was the first month of SamirBharadwaj.com. Problogger has provided me with an initial surge of traffic, but that positive is also the weakness of this site at the moment. Almost all incoming traffic is for the Top Photo Tricks post at the moment. I need to diversify my traffic so that I can sustain it in the long term.
Also I still need to make many technical tweaks and changes to this blog to get it looking and working better in some areas.
A good start and plenty more to do. As always, I will keep you posted on my progress right here on this blog. You can also subscribe to my RSS feed to keep your fingers on the pulse here and for a lot more great content. Until the next post …
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. Yes, I already know the big secret. It’s impossible to not know it if you’ve had any exposure to popular entertainment since its release. What this blissful ignorance of that movie means to me as a movie lover is that to me M. Knight Shyamalan is not M. KNIGHT SHYAMALAN(!), but just another accomplished director of popular cinema. You might think that means I don’t like his work or don’t give him much credit, but that’s not true. What it does mean is that when I’m watching any movie by this Writer-Director, that came after his stellar debut, I have the advantage of objectivity.
I’ve always been a huge fan of free software. 
