Today, my blogs hit a new milestone.
This blog, A Shareware Life, started in May 2003 and has built up a nice amount of traffic, for a blog. It's traffic has steadily increased over time, with a big jump last November when I switched to TypePad.
My other blog, Solitaire Trader, my stock trading blog, started less than 5 months ago in November 2005. It's traffic has been increasing at a faster rate.
Today, Solitaire Trader now has more page views than A Shareware Life.
There are two main reasons for this, aside from the general increase in traffic that Solitaire Trader has gotten since November.
Last week, Google introduced Google Finance. One of its best features is that it features blog posts about a particular stock. For example, see this page for the stock ICON. While it is debatable whether Google Finance is going to be able to compete with Yahoo Finance, there is no doubt that Google Finance is getting traffic. Within a couple of days after Google Finance launch, half of the traffic to Solitaire Trader was coming from Google Finance. Traffic doubled in a week.
In addition, this week I started a new feature on Solitaire Trader. I am now posting Watchlists every evening. These watchlists show the stocks that I'm looking at closely. It seems that these watchlists have had a big impact on traffic and are generating a lot of page views.
The next step for Solitaire Trader will be to put ads on it. I'm not sure yet whether to use AdSense or something else. AdSense didn't work very well here on A Shareware Life, but with the different subject matter maybe they will work better on Solitaire Trader.
You can't make a post like that without actually saying what your traffic numbers are.
Spill!
Posted by: Phil Steinmeyer | March 31, 2006 at 06:17 PM