We’ve had Paddling Planet running for over a month now, and it seems to be reasonably popular and well used.

The site has about 100 visitors each day, which hopefully translates to well over 100 visits to the blogs on the planet. Few people linger on Paddling Planet, the average visit is less than 3 minutes, which is by design. Visitors are supposed to continue to one or more of the featured blogs, not hang around on the planet. It is supposed to be a place of transit, not sojourn.

About 45% come directly, that is from a bookmark or by typing in the address www.paddlingplanet.com. Some 51% come in via links from other sites, which I would consider the preferred way. Very few come via search engines, only 3,5%, which is acceptable since the site has no original content.

The Paddling Planet is most frequented from N.Europe (GB,Scandiavia,Baltic) 41%, N.America 31%, W.Europe (Germany,France,Benelux) 12%, S.Europe 7% and Australia/NZ 6%.

How can we improve the Paddling Planet?

Here are a few suggestions. Feel free to add more in the comments.

• Tell people about the Paddling Planet
• Write often on your blog – so we keep it lively
• Configure your feed – a short summary seems to work the better
• Suggest new blogs for the Paddling Planet
• Add a link to your blogroll

That last one is worth repeating: link to www.paddlingplanet.com so your readers can find all the other blogs too. In the end we all stand to gain readers by promoting the Paddling Planet. Blog readership is not a zero-sum game. We do not necessarily lose readers by sending them on to others, and by actively promoting the Paddling Planet, we can all help sea kayak blogging getting bigger and better, so add www.paddlingplanet.com to your blogroll 🙂