Well close enough, but January ended up being my best month for traffic in a very long time across all my blogging properties. The question is, what did I do different, or what happened to change all this? There are some things I did, there is some advice I followed, and there are some things that just happened. Here is how it breaks out.

Some of this is still fall out from being part of the December FriendFeed to follow group, Social Networking makes up 12% of the overall traffic, this is down from December, but there is also a good reason why. The numbers are the same in terms of traffic sent by social media, but this month saw Google come back with a vengeance in terms of sending traffic. Word of mouth and the increase in twitter, friend feed, social median, and other followers sent 740 people to the web site.

Google – early in January I asked Google via the web master tools to fix the bad keywords issue with the web site. We are not about drugs or Pr0n, and they did it. The advertising on the site got more in line with what I wanted it to be (no increase in ad clicks, actually no ad clicks at all for the month) and kept my Google page rank of 4. I have to give credit here for Google; they went from 18% in December to 42% of traffic because of this. Of course I saw the immediate benefits for which I am happy. Google did well here, it only seemed to take them a week, and while I never heard from them, they obviously fixed the keywords issue with the web site, and that deserves a big thanks. I am now trying this on other word press sites to see what happens.

Technorati – there has been a huge increase in Technorati ranking, this is the first time that I have ever crossed over the 100K in Technorati, right now I am sitting at 84K, and that is getting attention from other folks as well. I followed some advice by Robert Scoble on this one, and started looking at sites outside my immediate social circle, meaning I started reading Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and others and started taking a look at what they were saying. Some of these ended up as blog entries; sometimes you need more than just a few words to say your peace. This meant I became part of the conversation, and people linked to me as they made their own arguments within the conversation.

FriendFeed has ended up being a god send, along with Social Median to help raise awareness that I exist. While FriendFeed came in at nearly 4% of traffic and Social Median came in just a tad under 1% of traffic, the attention of being made popular there has been helpful to raise awareness. As articles get commented on at FriendFeed or people promote the article on Social Median, more people are discovering the site and then coming on over to see what else is going on.

I showed up on Techmeme for the fifth time as the month opened up, that was a nice added bonus for raising awareness that I exist. Techmeme might not send me traffic (they sent over 16 visitors) but it is good for getting attention. If you are on techmeme, in many ways you have arrived.

Word of mouth, and for this I owe much to Michael Fruchter and Louis Gray, they are huge supporters, and are using their own reputation to bolster mine. Every time they comment, like, or repost something, there is an immediate flurry of traffic from FriendFeed or other systems. These two have ended up being my biggest supporters, and there is no way that I can pay them back other than to someday do the same thing for someone else.

Phil Glockner – his influence has been interesting, I have blogged under my own name on many sites, and Techwag was an exception to this. Until Phil pointed out something very important, it is hard to make a connection with someone who is anonymous. Since putting my name on this I have been linked by Computer World and other bigger sites, which is something that happens all the time over on Toolbox where I also blog. This has had an interesting impact, as my students have found this site, and others who I associate with professionally have found this site. There have been some interesting conversations to go along with that discovery. Nothing bad, and food for thought here.

Techwag was also put on the list of top 100 Seattle Technical Blogs for Startups helped out with traffic to the web site. This is an important thing to note, that this opens the door to have a bigger influence for startup companies in Seattle. The problem with this is getting them to stop and talk. That was the original intent of this blog was to cover the Seattle startup scene, but that has not gone as well as I would like. There are a lot of interviews, there is tons of video footage, but many of the products are just not going to find an audience. Blogging about them will not help them. Thing to note though, the bigger benefit would be to take a look at what they are doing and help them work out a social media approach that might do them better than I can. I’ll help any Seattle Startup get started in Social Media, and I won’t change a dime if we can keep the hours reasonable.

In all January ended up being an interesting month, there was a lot of word of mouth, a lot of the social systems helped, but the biggest influence was getting Google back. All the other things that happened to go along with it shows that social networking, the influence of friends, and the advice of others are important things to follow when you can. Friends are good for blogging, and for those who are thinking of trying to game social networks, this will be harder because the nature of social networking precludes gaming. It is very hard to game social networking because of the connection involved. You might game a small community, but it will be harder to game people with real influence and a very real say over what is and what is not worth paying attention to.

Much like other social systems, it is that network of friends that is hard to simply invent and create. We might want to be popular but we have to earn it, and show that we are trust worthy to be there. Word of Mouth is what helped make this my best month ever across the board (across the board I have had 50,000 people read my stuff this month), and Techwag showing its best month ever.

Thanks to Louis, Michael, and Phil, you made a difference, I noticed, thanks much!

Tags: traffic, social media, twitter, FriendFeed, Social Median, Technorati, links, time, ads, interesting