A few weeks ago, I posted an open discussion on my blog stats, in which I discussed my blog stats for the first half of the year in some detail. I’d set a goal to increase the views on my blog and I was doing a good job. In the weeks since that post, I’ve seen my average daily views exceed 200 for a few weeks. But the last two weeks the trend has been down. At first, I was disappointed by this, but I sucked it up and figured that these things ebb and flow. There would be weeks that traffic was unusually low and weeks where it was unusually high. I shouldn’t stress over it.
But I can’t let things go that easily. And I started thinking: the stats that I reported on were for direct visits to the blog; people who came directly to the site to read the posts. The stats did not include, for instance, people who read the posts via RSS. My sites RSS is relayed through Feedburner, which, as it happens, provides a nice set of statistical tools of its own. This morning, I went over there to look at the data and was surprised by what I found. I pulled data for views over the last 30 days:
As you can see from the chart, the trend of RSS views has been going up. And more remarkably, on 3 days in July so far (circled in red), the daily views have peaked over 1,000/day. The average daily RSS views for the entire 30 day period is 516. Since July 1st that number is 737 views/day. I had no idea that so many people were reading the blog via RSS. If you include these number in my direct blog views, then I’m looking at about 700 total views/day, which is far better than I thought I was doing, and makes me feel better when I see the direct views going down slightly. I’ll be keeping a closer eye on the Feedburner stats in the future.
Another way to look at it, in total, is that in the last 30 days, I’ve had about 5,300 direct views on the blog, while I’ve had three times as many (15,043) views via RSS. That’s a total of 20,000 views/month or better than 200,000 views each year.
Of course, all of these are just numbers and say nothing about the quality of the content, but at the moment, they are the only measure I have to go by and not knowing what the numbers should look like (but seeing how they have grown in the last six months) I can only assume that I am doing something right.
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