47 blog posts, traffic stats, and milestones: update #14

August was a dense month. Rereading that update made me wonder how the hell I managed to write 47 blog posts in September, most of them in the first two and a half weeks. Scrolling back through the archive feels like reading the journal of someone who apparently didn't need sleep.

Read also: 29 blog posts, traffic stats, and tweaks: update #11

Now the move is done, and I kicked off October a bit slower than usual. Still, I wanted to sit down today with my September stats and see if there's a real difference.

Traffic stats

These are the ones I want to check this month:

• This blog

• TWO Docs, my flagship SaaS

• Stupid Hit, the site I built in less than a day

• My Spotify channels

This blog

I think I got hit by Singapore bots. Out of 249 new users, 127 came from Singapore. More than half of my new traffic from one country in one month doesn't look organic. I still need to figure out if it is, and how to block that specific traffic.

If I strip Singapore out completely, I'm left with 122 new users. That's still up from 82 in August, so even the worst-case reading is growth.

I think the bots are also why the average time spent per user dropped so much. In August, I only had 82 real visitors, but they stayed far longer.

Most of that came from the Spacemail outage posts and my two articles about Warmwind OS, which went deeper than my usual journal-style content. Someone reading a deep dive on a product's positioning sticks around. A bot loads the page, leaves in a second, and drags the average down with it.

Nonetheless, I'm satisfied with the slow growth. GSC shows a more realistic picture: 25 organic clicks, a 1.1% CTR, and 2.37K impressions in September.

I take that as a win, considering 99% of my titles are disrespectful to the traditional SEO game. When a title reads like "How do you vibe code a Mac app? Fuck I don't know.", no keyword tool on earth would sign off on it.

The oddest part is that my favorite movie franchise, High&Low, pulls in the most impressions. It's so random compared to everything else I write here.

One opinion piece about a fight scene, and it's pulling more impressions than anything I've written about building.

Read also: HIGH&LOW: The New World - I Can't Wait For This

TWO Docs, flagship SaaS

This is the one that impressed me the most, and it's also the one that motivates me the most.

In August, it pulled in 186 active users with an average engagement time of 2 seconds. September pulled in 502 active users and a 4-second average.

Still stupidly low, but it's getting a lot better. More and more users are browsing other pages too, which is a good sign.

But the one thing that stands out is chatgpt.com showing up in my traffic stats, tagged as an AI assistant. Somewhere, someone asked ChatGPT something, and it pointed them to two.so. I did nothing to make that happen, which makes it more interesting to me than any number above it.

Oddly enough, my content marketing and blog efforts for TWO pull zero traffic at the moment. I think that's because most of what I've written there so far isn't niche enough.

When I started the TWO Docs blog, I already considered the first 30 to 50 posts warm-up content. Once I get past that milestone, I'll start writing more in-depth, niche topics.

I can't complain, though. My blog topics are starting to show up as impressions, somewhere on page 4, 5, or 7 in the SERPs according to GSC.

So nothing is in vain. It'll just take time, and time is the one thing I have compared to most solo devs. I'm not burning through runway or answering to anyone, so I can afford to wait for page 7 to become page 1.

However, I think a lot of the traffic is incidental, which explains the engagement average.

People message each other on Facebook or write a post somewhere, end one sentence with "two," forget the space before the next one, and you get something like "I ordered two.So now I wait." The platform turns it into a link, and someone clicks it.

Then again, I don't mind accidental clicks either. Maybe a few of them turn out to be interested users.

Remember the stupid site?

This one was expected. I built Stupid Hit on a whim in August, and it ended up setting the trajectory for an absurd portfolio and my Idea Bench content. Back then, all of its traffic came from four Reddit comments that pulled in close to 1K visitors.

In September, the whole thing died down. Kind of. I was convinced it was about to hit zero, and I was wrong. 50 visits is more than I hoped for. Nobody is promoting it, I haven't touched it, and something still sends people there.

Holding onto this domain for years might compound once I expand Idea Bench and the absurd portfolio.

Spotify stats

Story Brew keeps going strong, even after the hiatus. I started recording again, added a new episode this week, and scheduled another one for next week.

172 downloads is 10x more than I expected for a channel that sat idle. Most stories pull in around 18 listens each, and I think that's fine considering the niche.

A bedtime story for English learners doesn't expire. It'll just keep compounding.

Story Valley stayed untouched in September, which I also expected. I haven't mapped out a real plan yet, and I've only uploaded 12 episodes. Last time I checked, it had two listens and one follower. One of those listens was me. The follower was also me.

Read also: Story Valley went live on Spotify: what's my plan here?

Maybe I need to revise the structure or my approach. I also still suspect YouTube is the better option for it, and I haven't uploaded anything there yet.

Milestones

Despite the traffic improvements and the ongoing continuity, I think the biggest milestone is that the TWO Docs MVP is finally ready to launch. I'm overhauling its website right now, because the app moved forward and the site didn't keep up.

I also can't dismiss that I lowkey launched Echo Room.

Then again, 47 blog posts still feels unreal, and it's probably not something I can ever do again. But who knows.

Final note

Reading it all back, September was lopsided. Most of the writing happened before the move swallowed the last week and a half, and October started with me sleeping in and unpacking boxes instead of publishing. I'm fine with that.

The numbers are small. 502 users, 172 downloads, 50 visits to a joke site. None of it would impress anyone outside my own head.

But I log these updates to compare myself against last month, not against anyone else, and on that scale almost everything moved in the right direction. Singapore aside.

I'll check back at the end of October. Probably with fewer posts, and hopefully with a TWO Docs website that finally explains what the freakin' app does.