Last night, I was keeping a close eye on my blog stats because I knew a big milestone was approaching. And indeed, shortly after 9pm Eastern time, this blog passed the 400,000 visit-mark for 2012. This is significant for several reason:
- Although I’ve been blogging since 2005, I didn’t really have much of a focus until December 2010.
- In December 2010, I had a simple goal: I wanted to triple the daily visits to my blog by the end of 2011. I need 2010 with an average of about 33 visits per day. I was aiming for 100/day.
- I had steady growth in 2011, and a few outliers, but in the end, I beat my goal, ending 2011 with more than 260 visits each day.
- That things really took off in 2012 really surprised me. I haven’t looked closely at the data yet (that will come early in January) but I suspect a lot of it has to do with my Going Paperless posts. So far, I’ve averaged 1,125 visits per day in 2012.
You can see this growth rate yourself, month-by-month since February 2010 (when I converted to WordPress):
I have no idea where 400,000 visits/year puts my blog in relation to other blogs. I do know that it is about 1/20th the traffic that John Scalzi has reported getting this year for his Whatever Blog. Beyond that, I can’t really say if 400,000 visits is a big number or just par for the course. It probably doesn’t matter. The fact that the blog has grown so much in the last year just blows me away.
These numbers come from WordPress’s stats package. They don’t include people who read the blog via the RSS feed. This morning, I looked into those numbers. It appears that I’ve had an additional 259,000 visits via RSS, bringing my grand total, to-date, to about 659,000 visits. That is just remarkable to me!
I will post a more detailed breakdown of the end-of-year stats in early January. I’ll try to include regional breakdowns and other interesting data that I can gather from Google Analytics and other sources. For today, I just kind of wanted to stare at these numbers, unbelieving, and say thank you to everyone who comes to read the blog, or leave comments here. It would seem I’ve actually attracted an audience and I am so grateful to have you all!
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400,000 is nothing to sneeze at, Jamie.
I’d be surprised if I got 4,000 hits a year, even before I transferred most of my operations to SF Signal and the Functional Nerds.
Paul, I’m just still trying to grasp the fact that there are that many visits. This isn’t a measure of distinct visitors, of course, but I plan to look at that when I take a more exhaustive look at my Google Analytics data after the first of the year.
What really surprised me is the speed of the growth. I know there are people out there who are overnight successes, but it seems that the slow-steady approach works for me. It worked for my fiction writing and it works here too. And in two years, my audience has grown from 5,000 views to 400,000. That’s two orders of magnitude!