Two Year Blogoversary

On March 2, 2011, I published my first blog post to “A Sunnier Bear”, which makes this close to my two year blogging anniversary.

My goal when starting this blog was to write timely boss guides for tanks. That goal has sort of fallen by the wayside because this recent tier was so huge and my progression has been unstable and not exactly where I want it to be anyway. Instead, I spent the last year writing about topics that interest me, like Brewmasters and active mitigation.

In the last year, the biggest change was moving my blog from Blogger to my own hosted site. The name changed from “A Sunnier Bear” to “Sunnier’s Art of War”, and I gained the ability to tweak minute aspects of my site. I’ve also rerolled, transferring my focus from bear druids to Brewmasters.

I miss some things about my old site, like that banner, but overall I’m happier with moving my blog and focus.

In the future, I’d like to push out boss guides incrementally so that I’m more likely to actually publish them. If I really wanted to increase my viewership I should also be more active in forums, but we all know that won’t happen. I also want to introduce some cool dynamic styling in my guides because plain old HTML is so 2005, but I have to learn how to do that first.

And now for some stats for the last year (actually the last 11 months, because that’s when I swapped over to Google Analytics):

Most Popular Search Terms

1. “sunnier’s art of war”
1. “brewmaster tanking”
1. “sunnier bear”
1. “brewmaster stat priority”
1. “guild wars 2 arah”

My Personal Favorite Posts

1. Brewmasters for Beginners: The Step by Step Learning Program
1. A Sunnier Musing: Healing Elixirs
1. Some Quick Brewmaster Tanking Tips
1. Things I Found in China that Reminded Me of MoP
1. Guild Wars 2: An Interesting Relationship with Femininity

Number of Published Posts

From March 2011-March 2012: 70
From March 2012-March 2013: 61
Total: 131

Posts per Week

1.17

Number of Subscribers According to Google Reader

A Sunnier Bear RSS: 125
Sunnier’s Art of War RSS: 20

Browsers of Visitors

And to see how many miserable people are stuck using the bad versions of IE where my website looks horrible:

Operating Systems of Visitors

I’m really surprised to see that iOS is so popular. I hope my site doesn’t look horrible on mobile Safari because I can’t test it.

Countries of Visitors

Flow

I find visitor flow charts really interesting. It documents where users go after they first land on the page. People that come to my site directly are usually the ones to investigate additional pages. People that come from google tend to land on my Brewmaster Guide and then check out the other links I have in my navigation bar (resources, weak auras, etc). My average bounce rate (i.e. the percent of visitors who leave my site after the initial landing) is 78%.

Pageview Growth

I feel pretty good about my growth, especially given that I moved my website, rerolled to a less popular class, and have been pretty bad about keeping up my most popular type of post: encounter tanking guides. Growth has been stagnant the last three months, but that will likely go up once 5.2 is released and I post more Quick and Dirty guides.

What Sunnier Looked Like in March 2012

What Sunnier Looked Like in March 2013

Number of Twitter Followers

March 2012: 286
March 2013: 555

Number of Tweets

March 2012: 2,226
March 2013: 4,167

Number of YouTube Channel Views

March 2012: 25,000
March 2013: 58,042

Number of YouTube Subscribers

March 2012: 39
March 2013: 109

Number of Emails to my Blog Address

March 2013: 32
March 2013: 70