Emily, Josh, and Leslie Mintz at EventingUSA have linked to us several times over the past few weeks, giving us fantastic exposure on one of the biggest eventing sites in the World. We also had tremendous fun this week with a thread on the COTH Forum, which has led to maybe an extra 200 regular visitors per day (maybe more), and shows the incredible power of that awesome cOmMuNiTy. I have also seen a lot more traffic from email urls, meaning that people are spreading Eventing Nation to their friends. Most of all, our strong growth is due to you making the conscious decision to regularly revisit Eventing Nation, thus supporting our efforts to bring you the latest eventing news in the most ridiculous manner possible.
Personally, I am shocked at how quickly people have spread the word about Eventing Nation. Heck, our tag-line might as well be 'Eventing Nation: Some Idiot with a Laptop and His Two Smart Friends'. With great traffic comes great responsibility, and I assure you that I lay awake at night worrying about how we can do justice to the honor of having so many readers. Thank you for everything so far, and please keep visiting, if only to see where we take this great experiment known as Eventing Nation. Go eventing.
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I didn't want to cloud the post with web design technique information, but one of the things that we stress here at Eventing Nation is delivering the best possible visitor experience. For example, we open all links in new windows because people told us they thought this was most convenient when we started the site. Many sites open links in the same window, which means they collect the 'hit' when the reader clicks 'back' from the linked site and returns to the original site. Also, we chose to post our entries on our Facebook page, even though some people just read us there and do not visit EN on that particular occasion. These choices hurt our 'hits' but improve your experience.
The loss in hits doesn't bother me because, as a general principle, we are much more concerned with 'visits/user-session' than 'hits/pageviews'. One 'visitor' can click refresh 100 times and give us 100 hits/pageviews, but that is a poor representation of how many people are visiting the site. From the very beginning, even when our traffic was small, our quality of traffic (time spent on site, number of times people revisit the site, etc.) has been very high.