Jonathan, Nicole, Benjamin and Abigail Wise

I never thought the day would come, but it has: The geek blog is outperforming this one.

I had originally assumed that spinning off the new blog would take maybe 15% of the readership away from this one — the folks who weren’t really interested in the latest baby pictures, or ramblings about things that bug me/make me happy. The actual number of total ship-jumpers was probably in the neighbourhood of 5%. Which means that most of my fellow geeks are also at least somewhat interested in our lives — not just the nerd talk.

So while we may have lost that 5% of my original site traffic to the new blog, about 10% were willing to at least check both blogs (these numbers are estimates, btw, I didn’t dig deep enough to get actual numbers) giving the new blog a little start-up traffic. That was in October. Blogging hasn’t been nearly as steady on the geek site, but when I’m working on a project, I usually try to capture my findings in case anyone else can use them. While this pattern probably hasn’t led to daily repeat visitors, apparently the content has been useful enough to make it fairly relevant for Google searches.

jonandnic.com usually has less traffic in the summer. We’re down from our usual average of about 180 hits a day, to about 135. Codepoetry is up to a steady average of 145. It took the main site years to get that kind of traffic, so I don’t know if its the fact that blogs are suddenly hip lately, the halo effect from jonandnic.com (although the cross-over numbers would seem to indicate that its not) or if geek content is simply in more demand. Nonetheless, its cool that very little effort (and not much SEO, given the lack of its own domain name) got such a nice result in less than a year.

I’m not really planning on refocusing my efforts on the blogs. I just thought it was interesting to observe. Summer traffic tends to be slow because our visitors, like us, would rather be outside. The fall brings a bit of a reboot for the Wise family, as we’ll finally get to start life again — in a real home, and at a new church. So I’m sure the blog posts will get more contemplative once September hits (and if they don’t, I’m going to need to find some more hobbies!) If you’re looking for something to read* until then, I’ve got a whole wack of new posts up on hacking an Apple TV over on Codepoetry

*I’d take this opportunity to link to some of your blogs, but most of you aren’t updating that much lately either. Come on, guys! I need something to read during breaks at work!

Posted on July 22nd, 2008 by Jonathan Wise
Filed under: Current News & Events