The first entry in this site posted on February 8, 2010: How to Travel With a Sibling . Six months later, I am thrilled with how big of a success Adventurous Kate has become!
First of all, I am so grateful to you, the readers. Whether you subscribed to my RSS feed, retweeted a link or commented on a post, please know how much that means to me. I appreciate it more than I can say. Without you, I have nothing.
Here’s an update on the state of the site:
The Good
Adventurous Kate is climbing steadily in the rankings. The site’s Alexa rank is currently at 168,907 and there are 131 RSS subscribers, 1,737 Twitter followers and 200 Facebook fans.
Traffic has been steadily increasing. Take a look at visits by the day and the week:
The traffic spike on the Fourth of July, mostly due to people Googling “boston fireworks time” (I rank #1), makes it hard to compare daily traffic.
To get a better perspective, take a look at weekly visits:
I’m not revealing specific numbers, but I am extremely pleased with how traffic continues to rise each week.
And check this out:
See those little bursts of blue at the bottom? Those mark days that I jumped into the top 100,000 most visited sites on the web, according to Alexa.
I love writing the #TNI recaps each week. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, not to mention my Thursday nights, but the resulting traffic and Twitter followers are SO worth it.
Financially speaking, I’ve earned some money from sponsored posts, which has been tremendously helpful, and I’m hoping to earn more on a steady basis. I’ve been starting to leverage two other sites I own with advertisers as well.
The Bad
Adventurous Kate still has a Page Rank of zero. This is the key to many forms of advertising, and I’m getting anxious to actually have a decent rank. I need to continue to work on link building , so please let me know if you’d like to exchange links.
The site has few Facebook fans . I did increase them substantially, however, by this week’s giveaway (have you entered yet?), which is only open to Facebook fans. I LOVE the interaction on Facebook and would love to see more fans there.
The site went dead in early July due to problems with plugin overload. I never found out which plugin caused the headaches, but I removed several of them. I’m considering switching hosts. This might help the site load time.
Six-Month Statistics
Here are the top five most popular posts:
- July 4th Boston Guide — A huge SEO success story for the site, getting tons of traffic for many phrases having to do with Boston’s Fourth of July celebrations.
- How to Be a Good Travel Tweeter — Not surprisingly, this post was HUGE on Twitter.
- Top Five Places I Refuse to Visit — Many opinions were shared in the comments!
- Family World Travel: This is NOT Charity — Not surprisingly, the blog’s most controversial piece drove plenty of traffic and much discussion.
- What to Eat in Florence, Italy — While not exactly a groundbreaking piece, this is always popular!
Top 5 search queries:
- adventurous kate
- boston fireworks time
- celebrity hangouts in las vegas
- pops goes the fourth
- travel blog stories
Top 5 cities for visitors:
- Boston (including Cambridge, Brookline and Somerville)
- New York (including Brooklyn)
- London
- San Francisco
- Seattle
What’s next for Kate and the site?
As I alluded to in my 26th birthday post …MUCH travel. Many adventures. Posts from exotic locations.
And I can’t reveal a word of it yet for many reasons. Trust me — I will reveal it to you the moment it’s prudent for me to do so, and it’s going to be AMAZING.
What I can promise you is that I adore this site and I relish every moment that I get to spend working on it. I’m not going away anytime soon!
Beyond that…you tell me!
What works on this site? What doesn’t work? Please let me know — privately or publicly — what you’d like to see.
Thank you all for being so thoughtful in your contributions to this site. I’m so glad that you, my fellow travel bloggers and travel tweeters, have become part of my life.
