Back in early October, I blogged that we had a record September for unique visitors (6,921) and comments (1,211). I was expecting we’d do even better in October because of the elections, but alas, when we unveiled a new look to LoGroNo in mid-Oct, we forgot to put back the Google Analytics code that tracks our traffic, so all of October’s stats were lost.
LoGroNo (Locally Grown Northfield) traffic for November was a record-setter for unique visitors, according to Google Analytics.
- 25,918 Visits
- 10,075 Absolute Unique Visitors
- 63,137 Pageviews
Why the big jump from 6,900 visitors in September to 10,000 in Nov.? Two national/international stories:
- Bonnie Obremski’s RepJ story titled Northfield video game designer immune to economic woes which was visited and pinged often by gaming sites around the world. That was the #1 blog post for November.
- My blog post titled Stealing lawn signs: an act of civil disobedience or amazing stupidity? The St. Olaf visiting prof made headlines around the world.
Participation: Number of people commenting during the month: 117.
Number of comments posted during the month: 933.
Congratulations Bonnie, Griff, Ross and Tracy.
Wow, world famous Locally Grown.
Joel Kramer at MinnPost.com is learning the same thing; you can be a local site, but if you want the big numbers, you have to expand beyond parochial interests. It is a delicate balance, everyone wants a large audience, but you must be careful not to dilute your mission at the same time.
This becomes really important for sites that want advertising support. The more eyeballs, the more income. In the case of the stories above, both fit the mission and also got worldwide audiences. Very cool.
Yes, congratulations. I suppose it didn’t hurt that, as Curt pointed out, the prof was also a model for a “softcore pornographic website” featuring men wearing women’s underwear! Why oh why didn’t St. Olaf google this man’s name before hiring him?