Dec 23, 2008

The Barley Blog 2008 Year in Review

I meant to do one of these sorts of posts last year after checking out how Al and Ron over at Hop Talk handled their own year in review. I’m a bit of a web stats junkie, constantly checking the latest referrals or traffic numbers, but I’ll be sure to keep this as more of a higher level summary. Bear with me.

Over the course of 2008, I hit the “publish” button 234 times as of today with 47 of those posts being beer reviews. At an average of about three a month, I definitely see some room for more liver damage reviews.

While not the most trafficked site I maintain, The Barley Blog had some decent traffic numbers for the year. As of this post, there have been 16,529 visits from 13,762 unique visitors. Not too shabby, but again I think there’s room for improvement, especially when the visitor trend has been on the rise.

As far as where these visitors coming from, the vast majority (80% to be exact) reside within the United States while The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany round out the top five. Interestingly enough, it appears as though craft beer is truly global as this site has gotten visitors from the likes of Nepal, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Paraguay to name a few.

Some of the more popular articles based on traffic data are:

While Google drove a good bit of traffic to the links above, the most commented on articles were:

So there we have it, a brief review of how 2008 treated The Barley Blog. There’s a good deal to improve on and learn from after going through the numbers. I could do a better job fostering more conversation on the site, increase the number of reviews and get back into a regular posting schedule. I’d say it’s been a good year overall.

Thanks for making this site a joy to work on.

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