…the envelope please.
…and the winner is – The Messageboard Crew! (We’ll have to come up with an award like the SkiEmmy or something. Hey guys and gals – write us!)
My buddy and SkiSoutheast.com columnist, Joe Stevens was asking me about traffic to the website earlier today so that prompted me to have a look at our stats package and if the recent numbers are any indication of the rest of the season then all we can say is "look out for the avalanche!"
Over the last few years we’ve seen our website traffic start relatively slow and then surge upwards when ski season goes into full swing just prior to the Christmas/New Year holiday period. However, based on the figures for the last seven days we may be seeing all time records in terms of visitor numbers. More details in a second.
We knew we may be in for a great traffic season when back during the middle of June and July we experienced an AVERAGE of more than 6,000 unique visitors per day and nearly 40,000 pages viewed per day!
When I was emailing back and forth with Joe earlier today I assumed that the numbers HAD to be within that same range for numerous reasons. One was the fact that the weather has yet to be truly "winter-like" and the other reason was that we’re SO EARLY in the season that normally MOST of the interest in ski resorts at this stage come from die-hard skiers and riders.
Later mid-morning I hopped on the server and ran Urchin stats reports for SkiNC.com and SkiSoutheast.com and the numbers floored me! I was so astonished at the numbers that I looked back at the same period last season (when we actually had a burst of early cold and snow) and the visitor numbers for late November of 2006 were in the 14,000 range.
For the last seven days (November 18-24th) we averaged 37,052 unique visitors per day. Those visitors looked at an average of 9.3 pages each! That is 344,583 pages viewed per day. An astonishing 259,364 people have looked at 2,412,081 pages in the last week! Normally we have to get into late December before we begin seeing those kinds of numbers!
If and when we get some substantial snowfalls we’re looking at some avalanche-style numbers! Thank you guys for spreading the word!
TOP CONTENT VIEWED…
The messageboard crew will LOVE hearing this; the messageboard IS the top draw, pulling top honors in terms of first pages viewed. Most of the ski resort management staffs have previously held a "love-hate" attitude towards us providing that space on the site, however with a whole lot of self-policing and the help of ten moderators, the messageboard now has 1088 legitimate who have posted 105,231 articles or posts in the last two seasons.
The messageboard is kind of a ski club all its own and more often than not you’ll find as many as 25-50 members and guests reading and posting. The high point was actually June 24th, 2007 when 139 people were on there at one time.*
* We have no way of monitoring ligitimate guests online because too often there are 10-20 spammers on their trying to blog posts of one kind or another! However, we know that the messageboard is well visited by members and guests alike.
We can also tell you that a LOT of ski resort management staffers and owners are on the site quite often and some have usernames! Additionally you will see all sorts of professionals on there – from meteorologists to attorneys to accountants, engineers, laborers, students and more! It is a great place to meet fellow snow lovers…both online and on the slopes!
Many of our longtime messageboard members have written often to say that when they wear on of our hoodies or see the stickers…that they are asked "who they are" and upon answering – are OFTEN recognized from the board. It’s crazy…but we LOVE IT!
The messageboard entry page pulls 6% of the daily visitorship and the rest of the top pages visited honors go to:
2. Front Page of the site (both SkiNC.com and SkiSoutheast.com)
3. Slope Conditions
4. WebCams Pages
5. Photos of the Day
6. Videos (this is new!)
7. Contest pages
8. Accommodations Links
9. Weather pages
10. Resort links*
* Combined, the resort links pull more visits than all of the other pages, however the individual resort pages on our site comes in 10th and below.
** Just for the record SkiNorthCarolina.com has 8,290 pages of content and our sister site of SkiSoutheast.com has more than 3500! That is more than 11,000 pages of content! No wonder why we’re ranked number one on the search engines for most things to do with skiing within the Southeast, Mid Atlantic…and of course North Carolina!
One of our staff was telling me a couple of weeks ago that he did a search on Google for – snow skiing – and was amazed to find us ranked NUMBER THREE! Many of our linked to resorts pull top ranking as well, which in and of itself is another testament to the strength of our traffic and content. Can you imagine being outside the nine or ten southeast and Mid Atlantic states and doing that search and seeing us ranked THIRD! People from Utah, Colorado, Montana, California, Vermont, etc have to just shake their heads. We live in a crazy world don’t we!?!
Enough bragging (too much probably) but I simply had to share and say THANKS AGAIN to all of you who help make us one of the most visited ski presences in the entire country.
It’s early…so do us a favor and pass the word to your friends to visit the site.
See you on the slopes…
Until Next Time…
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