 | OurHometown.ca celebrated its seven month anniversary on August 27th and in the last 90 days our traffic has grown by more than seven fold. Last month, we reported that our traffic had quadrupled over the previous 60 days, but we really don’t know the proper word to describe this growth over the last 90 days. | |
Cornwall - Sep. 1, 2011 - OurHometown.ca celebrated its seven month anniversary on August 27th and in the last 90 days our traffic has grown by more than seven fold. Last month, we reported that our traffic had quadrupled over the previous 60 days, but we really don’t know the proper word to describe this growth over the last 90 days.
The month of August was our best month to date with a total of 30,467 visitors and 95,619 page views. These numbers represent a 58.8% growth over our July numbers.
A heartfelt THANK YOU goes out to the thousands of you who have made our site one of your regular online destinations.
Just under 85% of our traffic came from Canada - with Ottawa, Toronto, Cornwall, Montreal, Edmonton, Kingston, Calgary, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Mississauga being our top ten cities.
In the month of August we added a few new features to our site. Dean Eastman is now writing a regular column about the Montreal Canadiens and Greg Smith has joined us as our Ottawa Senators correspondent. Soon we will announce our Winnipeg Jets columnist and we hope to grow to a point where we have a columnist covering each of the seven Canadian NHL Teams.
Todd Bennett also joined our team of writers. He and Jason Setnyk have been producing regular and popular offerings of the “Pulse of Our Community.” Looking ahead to the fall we plan to bring you more food stories and our friend Mitch Melnick from the Team 990 has told us to expect more postings once hockey resumes.
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 2,791 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.
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.
Further, it is interesting to note that nine of the ten local sites have shown Alexa growth in the last month. According to the chart below, Variety104.com is the fastest growing area online media site in the last 30 days.
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 2,726 area events, including 1,202 in Cornwall, 286 in Stormont, 540 in Dundas and 698 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 173 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 981 stories including 147 from fifteen 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 2,463 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 1,541 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 seven-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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