Introduction
This article continues the trend of posting a summary of our monthly web traffic. This month was fairly straightforward with not much to note. Traffic levels were low when compared to previous months, however that reflects lower content than in the past. One item worth noting is that we did receive decent traffic levels  considering much of the month we did not post new content. This reflects our belief that building a high traffic website or blog takes much effort up front to overcome gravity, but once momentum is built it will continue to move without as much effort. One may liken this to riding a bicycle, pedaling is hard up front, but once momentum is built the wheels will continue to spin and the bicycle moves with less effort required by the cyclist – so it goes with a blog or other website.

Web Traffic Analysis
Let’s start out by reviewing our daily web traffic and overall summary of activity. Figure 1 provides a visual depiction of web traffic as measured in terms of page views.

Figure 1. April 2009 Daily Web Traffic

As may be seen in Figure 1 our highest traffic day occurred on April 19, 2009 which corresponded to a total of 357 page views. The article posted on this date was “The Entrepreneurial Battlefield?”.    Interestingly this article also prompted the most social media activity for any article that we have posted to this blog – being submitted by readers to Digg, Propeller, and Reddit.

Our lowest traffic day was on April 28, 2009 with one page view. This was mainly due to lack of activity on our part – we had taken a trip to Greece during the last week of the month and Internet connectivity was fairly spotty – unfortunately we did not anticipate the extent of this. The last article was posted on April 22, 2009 which was “The Art Of Public Speaking”. Six days without web content allowed our web presence to stagnate a bit, which in turn impacted traffic.

Let’s look at what we posted and when during this month:

1. Knowing Yourself - April 17, 2009
2. Web Traffic Summary, March 2009 – April 18, 2009
3. The Entrepreneurial Battlefield – April 19, 2009
4. Vulnerable Marketing Outline – April 20, 2009
5. Synchronicity 101 – April 21, 2009
6. The Art Of Public Speaking – April 22, 2009

As shown only six articles were posted this month, the first being on April 17th and the last on April 22nd. This leaves quite a bit of time without coverage.

Now let’s check out some detailed numbers for the month of April as shown in Figure 2 below:

Figure 2. March 2009 Web Traffic Summary

Key metrics for Figure 2 are the average traffic per day which was 78, the highest web traffic day of 357 page views on April 19, 2009, and the lowest web traffic day of 1 page view on April 28, 2009. There was a 82% decrease in overall web traffic when compared to last month.

Figure 3 provides the traffic summary by week; areas of interest for the month of April are 2009-14 through 2009-018.

Figure 3. April 2009 Weekly Web Traffic

Traffic during this period may be broken down as follows:

1. Week 14 (3/29 – 4/4): 391 page views
2. Week 15 (4/5 – 4/11): 151 page views
3. Week 16 (4/12 – 4/18): 616 page views
4. Week 17 (4/19  – 4/25): 1,260 page views
5. Week 18 (4/26 – 5/2): 91 page views

Note that the highest traffic for this month occurred during Weeks 16 and 17. This corresponds directly with the weeks in which new content was posted on a regular basis.

Figure 4 provides a monthly view of web traffic for March 2009.

Figure 4. April 2009 Monthly Web Traffic

Here are the values to date for 2009:

1. January 2009 (2009-01): 19,070 page views
2. February 2009 (2009-02): 29,357 page views
3. March 2009 (2009-03): 12,589 page views
4. April 2009 (2009-04): 2,343

As discussed earlier, posting regular content does impact traffic as noted by the monthly numbers.

Lessons Learned
There are three main items I would like to discuss here that I learned from April performance:

1. Content: Posting regular content matters. April was a slow month when compared to past numbers, however I am still pleased with the performance. My posting of content was also much slower this month, but we continued to receive visitors nonetheless, this is undoubtedly from the momentum we had built in the past. It is certainly true that the more we can post on a regular basis without sacrificing quality the better the traffic numbers will be.
2. Momentum: Momentum is truly a remarkable concept. Early in the life of this blog we had posted new content on a daily basis, sometimes multiple articles a day. This posting schedule allowed us to build up a sizable library of quality content in relatively short order – at the time of this article we now have 86 articles in our archive. This momentum also allows for the blog to keep moving even while we are away – which is truly a great thing!
3. Social Media: April was a great month for social media. As discussed previously “The Entrepreneurial Battlefield” resonated with our readers who spread the word quickly through social media. My guess is that this not only helped traffic for that article, but also turned new readers on to this blog – social media is very powerful indeed!

The importance of building momentum early and leveraging the power of social media cannot be overstated. The tricky thing with social media is that one never knows which article with resonate with readers, the only thing to do is make it easy for your article to be submitted by making it a permanent link and having access to social media on your blog.

The importance of content, momentum, and social media were demonstrated during the month of April!

-John R. Sedivy of Cape Cod Branding