Barley Blog 2011 Year in Review
The past 12 months have absolutely flown by. This year-end post completely snuck up on me, but I think I’ve got everything covered — nerdy site statistics and more. So without further adieu, let’s get into the 2011 year in review.
At the time of this post, there were 278 total posts with an average of just over 23 per month. Looking at last year, that’s only an increase of five additional articles. Of the posts for this past year, 183 were beer reviews (just over 15 per month) — that’s an increase of 48 over 2010. I don’t feel like I’ve increased my drinking, but I have been more adventurous in my beer searches as I’ve gotten into sours and krieks, plus I’ve been working with a few more breweries and PR companies.
If those numbers tell me anything, it’s that I’ve been consistent in my posting habits. That said, I think we can do better and have set the personal goal of 300 total posts for 2012. I’ve got the review process down, but, as usual, am completely lacking in the original content posts. It’s something that I’ve always struggled with since the inception of this site back in December of 2006.
Before we get into some numbers, I wanted to mention a trio of big site updates that occurred this year.
- First up and probably the most fun I’ve had developing this site is the mobile friendly version that was unleashed back in March. Using media queries and specific CSS, the site is more digestible on much smaller screens.
- For the longest time, I’ve been hunting for an alternate domain name for the site and in September, through auction, I was finally able to procure barleyblog.com (without “the”). Talking to folks, I hated specifying that they had to put that “the” into their web browser to access the site. Well, that’s no longer the case.
- Related to that second item, I also procured the short URL of brly.co for those of you on mobile phones. I hate typing in lengthy domain names on my iPhone. Hopefully, for those of you out there like me, the shorter URL will be of some help.
Now let’s get into some numbers. In 2011, The Barley Blog was visited 31,412 times by 26,342 unique visitors. Both of those are big increases over last year: that’s a 37% and 36% increase respectively in both areas. After struggling with boosting traffic in years past, I’ve finally got some traction and will hopefully continue the trend in 2012.
Google Analytics view of the site in 2011I’m not entirely sure why, but the site gets more and more popular in Malaysia. Over the past couple of years, visits from that area have continued to rise. Here’s how the site stands across the globe in terms of visits (only top five regions listed): United States (83.7%), Malaysia (3.73%), Canada (2.01%), United Kingdom (1.33%) and Sweden (0.94%).
As far as site content goes, the same two pages from last year continue to garner the majority of traffic on the site:
- Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy (beer review)
- Blue Dog Wild Blue Lager (beer review)
- Leinenkugel’s to Introduce Summer Shandy in Cans (press release)
- Thirsty Dog Old Leghumper (beer review)
- Shipyard Smashed Blueberry (beer review)
Only the Shipyard brew is from this past year. That damned Blue Dog review just won’t die, even having five more comments added to the post. It also appears that people are still really excited over Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy.
So there you have it. 2011 was a good year for The Barley Blog in all aspects. Traffic was up dramatically as were the number of posts. I cannot wait to see what 2012 has in store.