Year In Review : How Did You Find Me?

Taking another look-back at the stats on this blog for the past month and the year (or at least since Blogger added Stats) has shown some interesting developments.

As I mentioned in my last look at the stats on this blog, I've been using Twitter to tweet about posts.  I also started using Feedburner that will read the RSS feed and tweet the updates.  Linking posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN has also driven traffic to the blog.

My top referring sites are Google, Find1Friend and Facebook.  I was not familiar with Find1Friend, apparently it aggregates all social media.

The most popular search terms this year include:

• blogger : self-explanatory

• forrest chew salamonia indiana : Forrest is a member of my Chew family.  I wish whoever searched for him would have contacted me.

• travis lemaster : who is looking for me?  an old girlfriend?

• mary prevost : I have no idea how they found my blog through these search terms.  There are no references to the Prevost surname here.

• lambertson and wilson families of new jersey and ohio : Yes!  These are my people.  Who are you?  Why didn't you contact me?

There is now a new most popular post, GeneaLeaks, which rose quickly to the top after being highlighted by Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings.  Thanks, Randy!  Clearly, being mentioned by a popular blogger will lead to page views.

Just in the past month, there have been three posts that have received a great deal of interest, quickly moving them up to the top of my popular posts.  Once again, I find that once a post makes it to the sidebar as a popular post, it continues to receive more 'clicks'.  

Besides the previously mentioned GeneaLeaks, other posts with recent popularity include Applying SWOT Analysis To Your Genealogy Research and Building My 2011 Research Template.  I will be interested in seeing how 2011 stats pan out.

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by and commented on my blog posts. May you all have a productive research year in 2011!