 | OurHometown.ca celebrated its six month anniversary on July 27th and we felt that this is a good time to reflect upon our early success. We are pleased to announce that our online community website for Cornwall, Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry has more than quadrupled its traffic in the last 60 days. | |
Cornwall - Aug. 2, 2011 - OurHometown.ca celebrated its six month anniversary on July 27th and we felt that this is a good time to reflect upon our early success. We are pleased to announce that our online community website for Cornwall, Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry has more than quadrupled its traffic in the last 60 days. A heartfelt THANK YOU goes out to the thousands of you who have made our site one of your regular online destinations.
The month of July was our best month to date with a total of 19,191 visitors and 60,771 page views. More than 85% of our traffic came from Canada - with Ottawa, Cornwall, Toronto, Winnipeg, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Mississauga and Kingston being our top ten cities.
Our top three most read stories were very diverse and included politics, sports and local events. The top story was Guy Lauzon’s July 5th MP Report dealing with the Canada Post filibuster, followed by the Winnipeg Jets’ media release of their new logo, and in third was an article called “Clearing the air about Cornwall Lift-Off”.
In early June, we extended an offer to each of the three Provincial Candidates and provided them with the opportunity to write a weekly column to discuss relevant election issues. Two of the three candidates have taken us up on our offer and together have written a total of 13 articles. To date, those stories have been read 2,527 times from readers both from within and outside of our riding.
ALEXA
Occasionally, we get asked about our Alexa rankings. We do not believe that using Alexa is the best way to rank websites, as the Alexa ranking is very dependent on the amount of people that visit your site with the Alexa toolbar installed. The higher saturation of Alexa toolbars installed - the higher your ranking. This does not necessarily mean that a particular site with a better Alexa ranking has more traffic than a site with a lower ranking.
Having said that - Alexa is at least one way of measuring a site’s traffic in comparison to another. The most effective way however, is to get hard statistics from the site owner. This morning Alexa.com reported that OurHometown.ca “has attained a traffic rank of 4,786 among users in Canada, where almost all its audience is located.” Our site has been in the top 5,000 via Alexa in Canada since June 15, 2011, and has been as high as 3,686.
As you can see from the image below, if you used only Canadian Alexa rankings, we would be ranked in the #2 slot amongst all local online media sources. Based on the limitations of Alexa and the published web traffic in their newspaper, we believe that the Standard Freeholder is still the top-ranked site in our area, followed by the Cornwall Free News and then OurHometown.ca.
OurHometown.ca was launched on January 27th and is your online community hub for Cornwall, Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry. The website was built on four key principles - events, local information, news links and interesting columns.
EVENTS
In just six short months, OurHometown.ca has established itself as the most comprehensive event database for the region. To date, the site has helped promote 2,637 area events, including 1,144 in Cornwall, 267 in Stormont, 539 in Dundas and 687 in Glengarry. Local community groups can submit their event to the database at no charge by completing this FORM.
Further, OurHometown.ca has promoted and/or covered 130 events in the region. You can see our FEATURED EVENTS archive here. There is no charge for community groups to publicize their event on our site and the list of community groups that are assisted by OurHometown.ca continues to grow each month.
NEWS & OPINION
To date, we have posted 77 stories including 113 from eleven columnists. Our columns cover sports, local politics, cooking and much more. If you haven’t done so already, please take a few minutes to browse our pages and read some of these stories. All columns and stories are archived on the site, so that you can easily return to them at a later date.
NEWS AGGREGATION
OurHometown.ca is a powerful news aggregator site and throughout its’ pages you will find 2,407 links to news headlines, sports, business, lifestyle stories and more. The reason OurHometown.ca includes aggregation on its site is because it provides a good cross-section of information and reduces the time and effort needed to regularly check other websites. It is a service to our readers.
Our site grows every day and currently contains a total of 1,258 pages of which only 12 pages (less than 1%) contain any aggregated links. If a user Googles a certain topic, Google will take them directly to the site where the story is hosted and not to OurHometown.ca. As such, our traffic is generated solely by the content we provide and host.
THANK YOU!
We work hard at OurHometown.ca but we are still taken aback by the speed at which our site continues to grow. We have exceeded our expectations and goals for the six-month mark and we anticipate continued growth over the coming months. We are grateful to our readers, advertisers and contributors for their support and belief in the need for a site such as ours. We will continue to work hard to earn your support and regular visits and hope that you will tell a number of your friends, family, neighbours and co-workers about OurHometown.ca.
Thank you Cornwall, and S,D&G!
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