How is my website doing?

Published by Tobias Hofmann on

5 min read

2021 is six month old. I’ll take this as a reason to look back at the year and how my website itsfullofstars.de performed.

So far, very well.

The pure access statistics are not bad. I started my blog in 2014 and since then, the yearly access numbers only know one direction: to the top. This year will be different: instead of crushing last year’s numbers, it looks like 2021 will meet 2020 numbers. It seems that the numbers will be higher, yet the difference will be neglectable.

The weekly numbers show a slight fluctuation, but overall, the access numbers per week are more or less the same. If the numbers don’t increase, no growth is possible. That’s why 2021 will be the same as 2020.

This is different compared to 2020 when Corona started to affect people’s life. The first wave in March 2020 had a tremendous impact on the access numbers. The numbers decreased the following months, and with the second wave, people came back. If you want, you can even see the third wave in the statistics.

First, second and third Corna wave visible.

These are the dates of the waves in Europe and US. Access numbers from e.g. Africa are not high enough to leave a trace. If a second or third wave was in different month in Chile, I won’t be able to see this. The access numbers from the Northern Hemisphere are dominating. Country-wise I run a global website. Everything that is blue means someone from there accessed my site. I still run the site on a single server. No cluster, no HA, no failover or anything. From my job I should know better. That is also the reason why sometimes the website is slow or down: I do a maintenance (down) or get attacked with DDOS (slow/down).

Ein Bild, das Karte enthält.

Automatisch generierte Beschreibung

Why do people access my blog? Because of the quality content. I have several blogs that are listed as #1 search result by Google; or are in the top 5. Others are mentioned in several places at the official vendor site of a product or community. I do write about topics that I do. Something I have first hand experience on. I like to believe my readers acknowledge this. My top accessed content is not SAP related. That’s also a secret for a successful website: the SAP universe is smaller than you think. I have content about VPN or Raspberry Pi that is helping someone from a distant place in the world. Someone living in a country ruled by an inhuman dictatorship reading a blog from me about VPN, that access I value more than any SAP related content with millions of views.

Trusting Google for people finding my blog is not enough. I also trust Bing 🙂 Each post is announced on Twitter, which pushes the access numbers for around one day. After that, the tweet is lost in the timeline. What I do from time to time and depending on the blog is to announce it on LinkedIn. As I do not post dummy click bait content like free SAP training, the best SAP transaction you need, or what is SAP, the numbers are not very high. I am also not part of some international corporation where hundreds of employees view and like their managers post. As always, I prefer quality of quantity and to post content that really helps people.

The quality and LinkedIn strategy (at least I hope) over the last months contributed to the situation that several IT reporters / journalists reached out to me regrading SAP topics. Makes sense as I am pushing several important topics like the free tier for BTP or free access learning. It also seems that the number of people that talk about SAP’s strategy is limited. Makes sense to get the opinion of another person.

If you are wondering about the actual access numbers: No. I won’t post them. The numbers are no secret, I have told them very few people. Would it make a difference if I say I do have 1 million views per month or just 1 per year? As said above: if the one access is helping someone, the website already fulfilled its purpose. I don’t make money with my blog, it’s just for fun and maybe someday I will end it. Until then: enjoy.

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Categories: REST

Tobias Hofmann

Doing stuff with SAP since 1998. Open, web, UX, cloud. I am not a Basis guy, but very knowledgeable about Basis stuff, as it's the foundation of everything I do (DevOps). Performance is king, and unit tests is something I actually do. Developing HTML5 apps when HTML5 wasn't around. HCP/SCP user since 2012, NetWeaver since 2002, ABAP since 1998.

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