A CNCCookbook Milestone: Over 1,000,000 Visits a Year

Starting the week between Christmas and New Year’s, CNCCookbook began doing quite a few transformations to give the site an overall facelift.  We revamped our menus and merged the WordPress blog into the main site (it had been a separate site during most of 2011).  In addition, we’ve redoubled our efforts to publish more quality content.  The results have been rewarding as our traffic is way up.  I’m pleased to announce we now receive well over 1 million visits per year, and that we have over 10,000 of you on our mailing list.  For comparison, our traffic during January 2011 was 58,000 visitors versus 104,000 in January 2012–a 79% growth rate.

That’s quite an accomplishment, and we’re very proud of it.

For comparison, here are some measures of annual unique visitors by Compete.com:

Mastercam.com	9,261
CNCCookbook	11,201
HMEM	13,650
HaasCNC	15,147
MMSOnline	20,339
CNCZone	71,458
practicalmachinist.com	152,270
blog.makezine.com	201,155

Compete works by sampling an audience of 2 million to see which web sites they visit. It’s a pretty large audience, but the numbers are more representative of relative volumes than actual volumes. Nevertheless, we can see that CNCCookbook is moving up through the ranks of machining websites quite nicely.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you dear readers for making this possible.  It’s your visits, after all, that we’re talking about here.

The popularity of web sites is based on how well they attract new visitors and on how loyal their existing audience is about coming back.  We promise to do our part by providing great content that gives you a reason to come back.  If you like our content and want to see us keep growing, there are several ways you can help out in addition to dropping in from time to time to see what’s new.

First, tell your friends who may also be machinists and interested in this sort of content.  Sending them a quick email about an article you saw and liked really helps.  There’s a convenient button for this at the bottom of every post.  We monitor click throughs from email, and folks that discover us because someone sent them an email with a link to CNCCookbook are among our most loyal readers.  Thanks so much if you’ve done this for us in the past.

Second, help us out by clicking the gadgets you see at the bottom of every post.  We have buttons for Google’s +1, Facebook “likes”, Twitter’s Tweets, and sharing via LinkedIn.  If you use any of these services, you’ll know right away what they’re good for.  Please click on the ones you use when you run across an article here you really like to help get the word out.  Now here is something you may not have know:  search engines like Google are increasingly using popularity on such services as an additional way to decide which links to recommend.  For Google, the +1 button is extremely important.  Whether or not you gave a Google Plus account, please press our “+1″ buttons.  It only takes a second (hey, try it right now for this post), there are no popups, and it simply registers your vote with Google that you liked an article.

One more thing you may not know is that all those “+1′s” help Google to optimize your personal search results.  For example, if you “+1″ feeds and speeds articles relevant to machinists, Google will soon realize you want to see machining content more than feeds and speeds relevant to computer network performance.  In other words, if you click “+1″ on articles you like, you are training Google to give you better results over time.

Last thought on helping us goes out to those of you that have web sites or that are writers.  We’d love to have you link to our site from your own web site.  This is one more way that Google uses to judge how high to rank search results.  They figure if lots of sites link to a page, it must be a pretty good page.  CNCCookbook does extremely well getting links.  I guess folks are finding value here and want to pass it along.  But, just as you can never be too thin or too wealthy, we can never have too many links.

If you are a writer, we’re always open to the idea of a guest post.  Drop me a line with your thoughts on what you’d like to post about.  Let’s see what makes sense.  In the past, we’ve had some wonderful guest posts from folks like Robert Grzesek, the founder of MeshCAM.

Thanks again for your help and support.  With a little luck, we may almost double again in 2012!

Related posts:

1. Introducing CNCCookbook’s Machinist’s Search
2. We’re Moving the CNCCookbook Blog!

2 Comments

• 
  Robert Grzesek 2012/02/22 at 9:54 pm

  Congratulations Bob- a million visitors is a real achievement and it’s clear how hard you worked to get there. I’ll be waiting for the “two million visits post” by 2013!

  -Robert

  Reply
  • 
    SiteOwner 2012/02/23 at 7:51 am

    Robert, thanks so much for the kind words!

    Reply