Some end of the year and beginning of the year thoughts…

I pulled up two months of stats to see what I could see about this site and what people wanted that were reaching us through the search engines and other channels.

As you can see by the info-graphic below, most of our visitors were from the USA. Specifically California, Hawaii, New York as the big ones – and about 20 mid-tier states that generated decent traffic. Out of 20,500 visitors, one-tenth of those were from Hawaii itself. Not a great number, but of course I don’t offer much for those that live in the Hawaiian islands – they already know what living in the islands is all about, they won’t be reading anything about moving to Hawaii either. I don’t do news – there are plenty of places that do and copy everyone else’s news.

Visitors to AFA - Living in Hawaii - from where?

As far as visitors from other states and countries, Hawaii content is the most widely read. Most of the visitors wanted to read about “Living in Hawaii” and “Moving to Hawaii”. No surprise really, this is what the site has been focused on for the last couple of years.

Mobile visitors jumped significantly just starting since December this year. That’s interesting – I’ve not done anything specifically to target them, but maybe everyone is buying IPads – this is the device with the greatest increase in pageviews.

I still have a few personal development articles that just won’t go away – and that are bringing a lot of traffic to the site. Some of the visitors that arrive to read “What is the point of life?” also stay on to read some of the other Hawaii-focused pages, so I’ll keep that content up.

Pageviews jumped 150,000 year over year, comparing to last year. That’s nice, about 5,000 pageviews per month. I switched to a much faster server, and added some server functions that speed up site delivery to visitors. It’s about 3-4 times faster than it was. Bounce rate has fallen very significantly from last year.

I’ve been getting heaps of email from readers that are hoping to move to one of the Hawaiian islands in the near future. There are people from all walks of live that are considering a move – and sometimes I encourage them. Sometimes I don’t. I wish it was possible for anyone to move to Hawaii and set up shop, create a business, and make it work. It isn’t… as you probably know, maybe you even know from experience. Starting a business in Hawaii might be the hardest place in the USA. There are so many considerations to take into account. Most of what can be done – is being done. It’s not like there are giant spaces waiting to be filled with eager entrepreneurs… it’s more like, if you have a couple million dollars to put into your business – you can make it work. Otherwise, don’t bother.

You probably noticed I revised the site yet again. It would be great to check out the way back machine (archive) and see what Aim for Awesome looked like 4 years ago, 3, 2, and then recently. I’ve changed the theme a couple times and changed the layout often. I have more changes coming up as I re-define exactly what the site is about and which visitors and locals in Hawaii I want to target.

A friend from the United Kingdom (UK), Mark, and I got together over the new year holiday and he told me he is on-board for whatever big project I want to start in 2012. I’m trying to figure out whether AFA is the place to focus all our energy – or not. There are some needs that need filling – in the Hawaii niche, but is it a 5 year plan or a 1-2 year plan? I don’t think we’re up for another 5 year effort – we’ve both put our time into a lot of projects over the past few years. Better to build on something we already have going, I think anyway.

So, one big focus for me this year is Hawaii… this site has been on the verge a number of times of really picking up – we’ve had 800+ people per day to the site for weeks on end, and I just wasn’t focused on making the site any better at the time.

If  you have a website about Hawaii and you would like to swap links, please contact me at the email address at the top right-side column and I’ll be glad to talk about it with you. If you have a business, a non-profit, or something else you want to advertise here – again, let me know!

Best of luck and life to you in 2012…

Aloha,

Peter Kay

[Photo credit – flickr.com member, eye of einstein]