I started this wordpress blog a year ago ( http://brewster.kahle.org )– pretty with-it, huh? Soon I will open a Friendster account ☺. I basically write what I would write in my journal: first draft ideas and inventions, and a yearly paper usually on how to make the world a better place.
A few observations:
• It is somewhat unnerving to be public on subjects I used to be private.
• At first first I got about 5 readers a day, until I got a twitter account and would announce some of my posts.
• Now I get about 20-50 readers a day depending if I have posted on twitter. Humbling because the Internet Archive gets 2,000,000 visitors a day.
• On twitter, I have drifted up to about 1,000 followers in 6 months (81 tweets– I try to make them worthwhile). So maybe 7.5% read a post if I tweet it. Not sure how people find me on twitter, another mystery for another day.
What are other people’s stats? I would love to know.
My favorite posts: Debt Free Housing, Custom Schooling (class size between 1-4), Small Scale Fantastic Fish Farming, and Michael Hart Memorial.
Thanks for the testimony. I use WordPress.com, which doesn’t break down things to the level of unique visitors and how much time they spend per visit. But I did appreciate the year-in-review summary it provided; that went beyond the stats I usually see about page views, referrers and clicks to include some details about where my readers came from.
My big insights about what drives traffic:
* It really helps if you use a blog post to announce your unexpected departure from a job you’ve been associated with for more than a decade. (Not that I’m encouraging you to leave the Archive!)
* Writing a critique of journalism that gets approving links from luminaries like Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis can also work well.
* How-to posts that rank reasonably well in searches–in my case, an explanation of how to have Lotus Notes send all your e-mail to a Gmail account–are good for a steady background level of traffic.
* If you luck into WordPress.com featuring a post on its home page, that will also send a bunch of new readers your way.
Please keep writing…
– RP
Do your visitor stats include people like me who subscdribe to the RSS feed and read your blog in mail readers?
No, I dont think so. I believe the stats only count those that visit the web page.
Well, my stats are growing. I started out with nearly nothing, progressed to a few page views every time I posted, but went back down to 0 inbetween posts. Now I consistently get hits every day. My stats for last month were over 1,000 total. I notice some of my hits appear to be search engines that must be trawling for something, but more and more I’m getting people from other blogs that I read, where readership is much higher than mine.
The other positive is that people tend to stick around and read a few posts when they visit my blog, not just one.
Also, I usually post my posts to another site, BlogHer, and I get a bunch of page views there. So I am quite pleased that my readership is growing.
My twitter following is very small still, under 100, and I don’t get retweeted. So I’d like to work on that.
I don’t quite understand the low numbers .. Stats might be off. Im not nearly as well know, but I get 4838 unique visitors (8k visits, 27k pages, 162k hits) in jan. my blog is rarely posted to and gets about 1/2 the hits, and nothing else on the site changes and is mostly articles I’ve written. A stunning 36k of those hits are people hitting old URLs which shows the importance of redirecting stuff that moves.
3400 visits 42% were links from over 1000 other pages, which I guess shows the importance of that.
I can’t break out the RSS but they are included in these visits.
Note this isn’t naturalinnovation.org which only gets just over 1000 unique visitors per month.
Hope that’s useful.