doteduguru

It’s not a surprise to anyone that here we are in a new year.  Heck, we are in a new decade.  The new year also represents .eduGuru’s birthday and here we go pushing forward into our third year.  So before we move too far intoI just wanted to share some of what happened on this blog in 2009.

• 97,793 unique visitors - compared with 39,536 in 2008.
• 159 posts - compared with 196 in 2008.  I guess this is partially my fault as I wrote the majority of those in 2008, but then again we are all much busier this year.
• 2,000 comments - compared with 1,200 in 2008.  Either we haven’t been writing as “remarkable” content as we did last year or people are remarking differently.
• 46,000+ Spam Comments caught by Akismet as compared to 55,000+ last year.
• 1,700+ RSS/Email Subscribers - compared with 600+ in 2008.
• Visitors from 183 countries/territories
• Traffic from 1,352 sites – Top 6:
  1. StumbleUpon
  2. ow.ly - essentially Twitter traffic that we get through our Twitter following
  3. Twitter
  4. Google – (Non Search)
  5. BlogHighEd
  6. <uwebd/> Social network
• 58,876 visits by Search Engines (over 95% from Google) - compared to 14,853 visits in
• 34,214 different keywords in those visits - compared to 9,855 in

All in all I think we can say thatbrought very big growth as far as the numbers go.  Oh yeah, we also won a people’s choice award as the best higher-ed blog in.  Yeah, we had a REALLY good year.  So what can you expect from us in the future?  We are constantly bouncing around ideas, but here are some of our goals for the site in 2010…

Feature More of You

That’s right, we want to keep creating great content, but we also want to be featuring more of great things that you are doing.  Are you doing something cool at your school?  We want to know!  Share your stories through guest posts which are always welcome.  Also look for more lists of schools “doing it right.”

More Surveys and More Research

You are really interested in research and quite frankly we like good data too!  We would like to do more surveys and sharing of that data.  If you have ideas then help us brainstorm or leave a comment with your ideas.

Help Us Help You: Ask Us More Questions

There are seven of us on this team now.  We have a guru in pretty much any field related to the web.  From web development and web design to internet marketing and web security, we have an expert.  We also have you all in our wonderful network, and if we don’t know the answer then we know who to connect with that does have the answer.  Tell us what you are challenged with and let us answer it for you.  We haven’t finalized all the details on this yet, but look for more information to come.

Product Reviews

I think everyone is interested in getting more information about products and solutions specific to Higher Education.  We haven’t used all the solutions, so I hope to havecontent created by some of you about this.  Also, being able to cross reference various products based on specific requirements and standards is also open game.  Just having a list of the email marketing solutions or content management systems used by colleges and universities would have a lot of value.

Closing

So those are some of our ideas.  We definitely want to increase user engagment through comments and user generated content from the community.  This blog is only as good as the value our readers get out of it. Help us continue to keep it relevant and valuable to everyone!