Crutchfield Community

Crutchfield does an interesting job of blending together blog posts and forums in the Community Section of their website.

It is nice to be able to see how many folks viewed each blog post --- when you see a thousand or three thousand people viewing each post, you start to think that maybe folks find the content interesting.

Here's a link to the Crutchfield Community RSS Feed, if you're interested in subscribing.

Catalogers Utilize Micro-Channels, Social Media, And Community

Take a peek at the ways catalogers are utilizing what I call "micro-channels" to communicate with consumers.

Stork Avenue offers a series of lifestyle e-mail newsletters called Stork Avenue News, keeping you up to date on Pregnancy News, Parenting News, Featured Products, and offers an RSS feed.

At the Posh Cravings community page, one can join the "Mamma's With Mojo" community. There appear to be four personas that can be subscribed to via RSS, including Eventually Eliza, Syd Says, Allie's Aboard, and It's Isabelle!

The Alternative Energy Store hosts a community page for loyal customers and prospects, featuring customer stories, a customer gallery, and a series of forums. They even feature a series of classes and webinars.

The Mepps Fishing Guide catalog utilizes RSS to communicate news about fishing new lakes, new lodges and guides, and redfishing.

The Academic Superstore archives newsletters that offer helpful tips to different audiences.

MineThatData Traffic Analysis

Click on the image to enlarge it.

You're probably wondering how many folks read this blog, right?

Or, maybe the topic is only of interest to me.

Either way, you get to learn all about blog audience dynamics today.

According to my statistics, I have about 3,900 visitors per month (via Google Analytics) and an average of 450 daily subscribers (via Feedburner).

The image illustrates how we get to subscribers, and the true amount of monthly traffic generated by the blog.

During an average month, 1,873 visitors arrive via search (almost all via Google). 976 visitors arrive from other websites, about eighty percent from blogs referring folks to MineThatData (thank you all!). 200 visitors type in the URL.

Of these visits (3,049), about two percent (60) become what I call "Loyalists", folks who frequently visit the URL, or subscribe by RSS or E-Mail.

I estimate that each month, I add 60 subscribers, and lose 30 subscribers, yielding a net increase of 30 subscribers. To date, about 450 of you subscribe via RSS, E-Mail, or type in the URL frequently. You are my "Loyalists". Thank you!!!!

The 450 "Loyalists" drive the relative popularity of this site, visiting about 13,650 times a month. There are 854 actual site visits, 5,460 readings in Google Reader, 1,092 via E-Mail, and 7,098 readings in other RSS Readers.

In total, this yields 14,504 actual readings from my "Loyalists", and 3,019 visits from folks who weren't impressed with the site, or got what they needed from one visit and moved on.

In total, this yields 17,523 real "visits" each month.

There are flaws with the analysis --- there are probably many more "Loyalists" than measured by Feedburner --- BlogJuice suggests I have twice as many Bloglines subscribers as Feedburner suggests I have. So there might be as many as 1,000 actual "Loyalists", each visiting half as often as I have estimated.

Still, the number of real "visits" is a reasonably accurate reflection of what happens each month ... yielding about 210,000 annual visits.