Hello together,
in this anniversary article I will talk about numbers and statistics. Sounds boring? Just keep reading more, because you will learn about our most successful articles, how SEO, LinkedIn and Facebook help to advertise our articles and so on.
The beginning
At the beginning, there was an idea. We started to discuss about the blog project in spring 2015. Every one of us had different point of view and mostly this points of view did not change. This is not bad! You, as one of our readers, already recognized that every author has a different writing style and another approach to give you an insight in our favorite subjects. In general, you can say, we have a range from beginner (Waseem and I) to advanced level (Anja and Kathi). It seems to me, that the scientific level has only small influence on the success of a specific article.
Measurement tools
Usually you measure the success of an article by some parameters: views, „likes“, shares and links leading back to our website. Combined, these statistics can give you an overview about the „health“ of your whole website. The use of social and professional networks (Facebook and LinkedIn) are necessary to spread your articles. If the right reader shares the article to his audience, the view count can „explode“.
I use only tools that never save user information. So I see much less details, but I know the numbers of views and the top references to our articles.
Numbers
I can say that we have an average view count per day for the website of around 34. But we publish only 1 article per week. Usually our views peak on that publish day. The average article has 65 views on the day it was published. Over the time of 2 weeks every article gets around 200 views. I don’t know how many views are generated by a single user, but it is not really important for this statistics.
Over the last year we started with some general posts with nearly 0 followers, besides our friends. We started to share our articles on LinkedIn and Facebook. Few weeks later we created the Blogionik-fanpage on Facebook. This helped a lot to reach more potential readers. Only in this way got our first shares by professionals, which increased our fellowship a lot.
Our most read articles
- Where to study Biomimetics Part I + II – 200+ day 1 – total: 1000+
- Strategies for water condensation and collection – 75+ day 1 – total: 350+
- The Camel – a living air conditioner – 100+ day 1 – total: 300+
- The Interviews: Prof. Ille Gebeshuber / Prof. Thomas Speck – 100+ day 1 – total: 300+
- A Floating Turbine Article Series – 75+ day 1 – total: 300+
The total views give you an idea of the views after some weeks. All articles are still getting views and numbers are constantly increasing.
For me the most interesting part is the fact, that our articles get higher views the younger they are. What does this mean? Are our skills as writers getting better? I hope so! But it is more likely that our followers are also increasing in numbers.
By the way… we have now 175 likes/followers on Facebook!
Top references
As I told before, the most important things that can happen are shares. Our first share with a remarkable impact was about my A Floating Turbine Article Series which tripled our views of that time.
The share on Facebook was from the Biomimicry Institute, which is also directly connected to asknature.org and synapse.bio.
All of these 3 websites are part of the Biomimicry Institute and are the biggest reason for our increase of readers. This also shows, that our blog entered awareness in the USA and in both American continents. We have readers from South America, most remarkably from Brazil.
Goals and Hopes
In our second year, I try to expand our fellowship, but on such a small field it is not easy. My awareness was rising, when I skyped with our new guest author (spoiler!), because maybe he can help us to increase the interest of possible readers here in Europe.
In the United States the topics of Biomimetics and Biomimicry are much more established in science and public than here in Europe. As you can read in the interview with Prof. Thomas Speck, most people in Germany have no clue about „Bionik“ or have a complete different understanding of the term itself.
I hope this blog will help to change that.
It needs you, our readers, that we can achieve this.
So like it, share it and hopefully, also read it.
So long,
Jan
