John Linton
When I started writing this on line 'diary' of some daily events/thoughts in/about operating a small business my only objective was to record some of the 'thinking' that goes in to setting up and then running a small business in the Australian communications market place and to, perhaps, generate a higher visitor rate to the Exetel web site (an interesting fact I'd been made aware of while on holiday in the UK in June/July of this year). I wanted the record of my thoughts for my own use at some future time and when I was told about how using a 'public' blog could have a beneficial 'side effect' it seemed a great idea and one that would encourage a level of discipline that otherwise wouldn't be there.
I wish I'd been made aware of this sort of facility earlier in Exetel's 'life' as I would have been better able to look back on the issues and problems that have occurred and the planning (guesses) and other decision making processes that have gone in to setting up and then growing the Exetel business to date. Back in January 2004 all I was aware of was the 'news release'/history of concept that was, and is, commonly used on company web sites and which I have had the self discipline (and Exetel has had enough challenges and growth to make possible) noting two events each month that may have had some interest to a current or prospective user of Exetel's services. It has also been very useful lately in dealing with new suppliers, banks and other large entities.
Something that has come as a total surprise to me (despite starting this 'BLOG' because of the information that blogs generate a higher visitor rate for the web site they are based on) is the number of 'hits' the blog itself has generated and the increase in the number of 'discrete visitors' to the Exetel web site.
The Exetel web site visitor rates have increased month on month since the site was first put up in January 2004 reaching in excess of 550,000 discrete visitors/IP addresses in September 2007 an increase of over 250,000 visitors compared to August 2007 - an amazing 'leap' upwards compared to the 10,000 to 15,000 extra visitors per month that has been the monthly increase pattern for the previous 12 months (December and January excepted).
When I looked at the daily statistics (as I do on most days) the reason for the increase was the dramatic growth of visitors to the blog pages which peaked yesterday at a little under 30,000 having rapidly increased from 2 on the first day to 55 a day at the end of the first week to over 1,000 a day at the end of the second week and just under 10,000 a day at the end of the third week.
I turned off the monitoring today as it was costing a lot of, pointlessly incurred, expenditure (being based on a being billed on number of hits). However two things interested me:
1) Over 80% of the 'visitors' were from outside Australia
2) Of the Australian 'visitors' over 1,000 visited the blog more than 20 times in the last 30 days.
In terms of 1) - a significant amount of those would be web crawlers/robots indexing the common comms talk text (as I was advised would be the case) which in turn raises the profile of the web site in 'the eyes' of the search engines which in turn generates more hits from people who too loosely define their search words. Hard to see why people in some of the 100 plus countries (mostly non English speaking) who registered a visit would have wanted to read my random musings - but theres a lot to understand about this new process.
2) In terms of 2) - I'm not sure what to make of that figure. I assume that some Exetel people and some of Exetel's more interested customers would look at my musings on a regular basis but I can't begin to understand who else would bother - and as the number apears to be around 5,000+ yesterday it takes a lot of explaining.
.......yet one more surprise in this constantly surprising of industries.