It's been another hugely satisfying year regarding BlatantWorld.com. The total number of visits to the site grew by more than three-fold as compared to the 2010 stats, and a total of over a half a million page views is quite a substantial number for any website to achieve in any year. These figures suggest that this website is now reaching a great number of global citizens, and has the potential atleast to help with the flow of important information and dialogue, in a time when the mainstream media are just not doing their bit.
During the summer, at which stage it had become apparent that this website could really go somewhere, I decided to look over the entire website, and to get others with particular skills to do the same. I wanted to see how the website could be improved so that it could become an even more useful and efficient tool in getting information out there. We concluded that there were three key areas which needed attention;
1- Updating The Website Design: There are still some minor tweaks to be made, but this is mainly completed, and we are very happy with the results.
2- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Improvements: SEO is an ongoing thing, but we have made serious technical improvements which have seen our visitor numbers from search engines continually rise. Currently about 80% of our visitors first reach our website through Google, Bing, Yahoo, Search and Ask.
3- Financial Sustainability: If this website is to continue to grow, it will continue to require serious amounts of man-hours devoted to it, which will require a much larger income. To aid that sustainability, we have added more Google Adsense advertising to the website and better-positioned the advertising that was already insitu (as you may have noticed), plus we have begun to feature Amazon affiliate links too. While it looks highly unlikely that we will become sustainable by the end of 2012, it may be much closer to that point - particularly with continued growth in visitor numbers from search engines, plus through a lot of new content. We will also be attempting to further enhance our online presence with some additional niche mini websites, the first of which - DepletedUranium.info - has just been launched.
So, now that the Blatant World website is fully developed, and now that we have a clear focussed blueprint and platform for the Blatant Independent Media! project as a whole, the plan for the year ahead is to get as much new information, data, videos and images up there as is possible. Because, if we can grow this project further, it can add it's voice to the many other activists and concerned citizens who are doing similar things. Our collective voice simply needs to become as strong as the mainstream media's, and I believe that if the internet remains 'free', maybe we all can achieve that together. The way I see it, at this point in history that possibility is still very much on offer!
Thanks for the support throughout 2011, take care for the year ahead,
Damien Hughes, BlatantWorld.com editor
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