Well, 2012 has finally arrived, but 2011 was a great year for The Occult Section. We averaged about 15,000 hits per month, added some writers, added some advertising, and of course, stirred some pots. But in going through our stats, we’ve come across some interesting, funny, and sometimes perplexing trends for the year, which tells us a lot about how some of our readers find us.
Here in Part 1, we’ll deal with some external sites that have referred people to our blog for the year.
1. StumbleUpon.com: Stumble Upon is a great site for suggesting sites to other web users, and by far, most of the referred traffic to our site came from Stumble Upon, and our post about the FBI unveiling their online vault got the most people stumbling upon it.
2. Facebook: Coming in a respectable but distant second, Facebook was the second top referring site to The Occult Section. Of course we’re pretty active on there, and all of our blog posts are published on the site, so it’s no surprise that we get a bulk of our traffic from the world’s leading social networking site. The only surprise to us here is that it wasn’t the top referrer.
3. Google: Again, fairly surprising, but still high up on the list. The funny thing about our Google stats is the variety of keywords that people use to find us. That will be it’s own post later in the week, and there are some doozies in there.
4. TopParanormalSites.com: Top Paranormal Sites is a great little website that ranks paranormal websites (those who’ve registered) based on their hits and popularity. This is our 4th top referrer, and as of this writing, we are in the 20th spot on the list, which has over 300 sites listed on it. Not too shabby.
5. Anomalist.com: A great site that culls lots of paranormal news stories and publishes them on a daily basis. Not sure how many of our stories they have actually published, but enough to be our 5th highest referrer.
6. Twitter.com: The other social networking juggernaut, Twitter brings us the 6th highest amount of visitors, mainly because all of our blog post links publish there, as well as our updates from any investigations we do. We’re pretty active on there, so feel free to follow us! (Note: We mainly use the Twitter account of our paranormal investigations team, the New York Paranormal Society).
7. Zak Bagans – Official Website: Yes, you read that correctly. There is a direct link to our post about Zak hosting Paranormal Challenge on his official site, and it is the 7th highest referrer of traffic to our website. All of these hits are made up exclusively of girls under the age of 17. No judgments, please.
8. Networked Blogs: We used to use this Facebook app for automatic publishing of our blog to our pages, but various issues led us to abandon it. We just publish manually now, but for most of the year, this was our way of reaching our Facebook audience.
