Six month ago, on Jan 7th, ChinaBlog.cc came online. I’d like to make a review here and share some thought about my experience of authoring this blog.

1. Posts: I posted 61 posts and 9 pages in these six months as of 07/04/2009. They received 52 comments in total.

2. Visitors and pageviews: In June, Chinablog.cc had 986 visitors and 1686 pageviews. According to a technorati survey, I have median level visitors, but less than median level PVs.

Here are unique visitors and pageview stats of 6 months from google analytics.

3. Subcriptions: As of 07/02/2009, I have 15 subscribers as shown by feedburner.com.

4. Traffic source: 54.5% visitors are from search engine (90% of these are from Google; thanks, google!); 32.7% are from referral sites (30% of them are from google images search; problogger and facebook are also top referrals); rest are direct traffic.

5. Traffic ranking:

Google Pagerank: 2.

Current (July 4th, 2009) Alexa ranking: 859,367. It had reached 3xx,000 with cs-weekly.com domain. This number is not accurate, because I have alexa plugin myself, which generates lots of traffic to alexa stats. I guess any rank below 300,000 makes no sense.

My goals: 300,000 -> 150,000 -> 90,000 -> 25,000 -> 10, 000 (last two are hard to reach). Some example sites: chinasmack.com is now stable at 40k; yeinjee.com now at 50k; chinapage.com at 90k.

6. Post popularity:
Most viewed posts:

• 1. Mo Li Hua (Jasmine Flowers): the symbol of Chinese Music
• 2. Why no year of the cat?
• 3. Yaodong – Cave Dwellings on Loess Plateau

Most commented posts:

• 1. Why no year of the Cat?
• 2. Top 6 Grasslands in China with Google Earth Links
• 3. Siheyuan: the Chinese Housing Dream

7. Map: This is the geolocation map of all visitors around this small planet. Briefly, Singapore is the city of Chinablog.cc readers; and United States has most readers among countries.

8. Domain name: When I started this blog, it was originally easternstory.com; I switched to cs-weekly.com on Jan 15; later, when google page rank reach 2 in may, I switched to current chinablog.cc. I think I will stick to this one.

9. WordPress theme: I used three themes so far: Corporate by oripearl -> iNove by mg12 -> Arthemia by colorlabsproject

I’ve learned a lot about HTML/PHP/CSS during these months. It’s really enjoyable to tweak themes to fit your need.

10. Promotion: I tried a few ways to promote my blog. Such as commenting on other blogs, such as problogger.net, blog carnival, facebook, twitter, ads, etc. But it seems I don’t have enough time for marketing. So I decide to focus on posting.

Summary: That’s pretty much for the first 6 months. I did not achieve amazing traffic or readership, but at least I have successfully posted continuously for 6 months and haven’t abandoned this blog. That’s pretty good!

Wish I can keep posting on and on. See you after another 6 months~