Five years of Leiden Law Blog
The Leiden Law Blog is celebrating its first anniversary. The blog attracts many visitors and scores well in Google. Tips for bloggers: link to previous blogs, post them on social media and respond to comments.
In the past five years the Leiden Law Blog was visited 262,000 times and had 168,000 unique visits. Content for blogs was supplied by 299 bloggers (including 110 guests made up of former staff members, alumni or students). Together they wrote 931 blogs.
2016
42,000 unique visits
In 2016 the blog had no fewer than 58,000 visitors (excluding the visitors from within our own university). The number of unique visits totals more than 42,000 and had risen by 3,400 compared to the previous year.
Large number of international visitors
Of all visitors, more than 40% came from the Netherlands and 60% from abroad, with the USA and UK in the lead with around 10% of all visitors followed by India, Germany and Belgium with around 3% visitors.
The top 20 cities where visitors come from includes 10 cities abroad (in 2015 this number was 8). Leiden and Amsterdam lead with around 4,500 visitors, followed by The Hague with 3,000 visitors. We had 2,200 visitors from London, 800 from New York and 550 from Brussels.
Easy to find in Google
Two-thirds of all visitors come to the Blog vis a search engine, one quarter types in the direct URL. Around 8% of all visitors comes to the Blog via social media. Another 8% arrives at the Blog via a link provided in another site. Many people leave the Blog once they have read the article they were interested in. These are mainly one-off visitors. One quarter of all visitors views the Blog using their mobile phone or tablet and the number of returning visitors is 30%.
Decrease in blogs and bloggers
The number of blogs written in 2016 dropped by half (from 200 to 100). Also the number of participating bloggers has decreased. In 2015 there were more than 60 new bloggers, in 2016 this was just 26.
Three tips!
Of course, we would like visitors to the Blog to do more during their visit like check out several pages, get more involved in the Blog and come back more often. What more can you do, besides writing a good blog?
- Actively refer visitors to other posts (provide links to related blogs, or write a series of blogs on a certain topic and refer to these)
- Share your blog via your personal social media channels
- Respond to comments
Finally: most popular blog posts
In the top 25 of the most popular blogs in the past 5 years we have the following posts.
| Blogger | Blog | Pageviews (unique) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jan Vleggeert | What about CV-BV structures and state aid (20-04-2015) | 6.584 (6.042) |
| 2 | Thomas Weber | Shining a light on the acte clair (22-09-2015) | 3.095 (2.753) |
| 3 | Henk Vording & Jan Vleggeert | How the Dutch help Starbucks avoid taxes (17-12-2012) | 2.979 (2.545) |
| 4 | Marco Bronckers | Schizophrenia in the EU about International Law (21-01-2015) | 2.426 (2.047) |
| 5 | Jeroen van der Weide & Pieter De Tavenier | Common European Sales Law and EU-competence: A Never Ending Game? (08-08-2012) | 2.314 (2.089) |