Visits to my Home Page since April last year show a healthy and progressive increase. This is a nice metric for how successful a blog really is.
An interesting blog will get linked to and certain posts might become very popular – this is what Wikio works on. This particular metric records mostly those that come visiting directly or by typing “left outside” into google. Its a measure of how much people generally want to hear what you say.
Apparently I’m attracting people at a faster rate than I’m repelling, which is nice.
January was the second month I’ve hosted a post from Otimtom’s. His Don’t Talk to Frank began to reach a wider audience when it was linked to by The Staggers, the great blog from the New Statesman. 156 hits and link from the New Statesman is a lot better than my second post got in three days.
But below is the money shot. I’ve blogged every day in January and my frenetic activity comes across in the much larger audience I have reached this month with nearly 11,000 page views.
This month I have been linked to by more people than I can shake a stick at and that is in large part why I’ve had such a fantastic month. This big contributors where Devil’s Kitchen, Dan Hannan, Liberal Conspiracy, Graham Lineham on twitter and Hopi Sen. Cheers all.
But, especially Graham Lineham who made my post on #uksnow do this.
For a bit of fun below you can see the words I used in January. Sadly Haiti looms quite large, but the prominence of people and climate is quite heartening. They are the reasons this is called Left – for the people – Outside – for the environment.
Filed under: Blogging
You’re doing very well.
Well that’s given me a hard on…
Well done. Consistency pays!
How d’you manage to get 10,000 hits but are trumpeting a post that only got 156 views on 1 day?
Last month I clocked in regularly at 170+ a day, with a fair few posts in the 200 category and more than ever capping 300 – and I only totalled 6,500 last month!
(or are you just being nice about 1 post??)
It’s a form of gentle encouragement I think!
I wasn’t plugging a post I’d written. Otimtom has only had two posts here and considering his second did so well, compared my second post, I thought a “form of gentle encouragement” was in order.
It was receiving circa 4,000 hits for the snow post refered to above that pushed me up 11,000 this month. It was the same with the last bump in October, I wrote the first Jan Moir apology parody, because i was up late on the Mail website (as is my wont), and got an extra 1000 hits compared to where I would be otherwise.
Anyway, I have always wondered how many readers you get. I’m nosy, more people should do stat porn!
Your blog content is consistently more in depth than mine and (especially) your geek posts are always worth a read in full. I assumed you got more, you definitely deserve an even wider readership than 6,500. What’s your record?
nice one, good to see you guys growing. Trust me – takes time and persistence!
and lots of time :(
sunny
Last month, with 6,500, was my record.
Prior to that I bumped along at between 4,500-5,000 a month.
That’s decent enough, I think. I don’t spend enough time on other people’s blogs and on Twitter to generate heavy traffic, I think. I get quite a lot of people coming across from Stumbling and Mumbling, a few from Lib Con if I get something provocative up there.
Also, a lot of my posts are too long, and I think that puts off a lot of people. I try and write more like Chris Dillow but I’m too self-indulgent and long-winded!
Yeah, I think my default is in a slightly similar region to yours. I think my shameless self promotion means the occasional post really takes off and boosts the numbers.
Chris Dillow is my blogging mentor (not sure he realises he this) and I do try to copy his concise style a little (I do wish he’d paragraph his posts better though…). My most popular posts also tend to be the shorter more pithily argued ones too.
Jack of Kent is someone else who’s style has influenced mine. Great Blogger.
Also, I’ve begun to split up longer posts so that there is one argument in a post but maybe a couple of posts on a subject, I’ve done 3000 words on immigration before and a few people read it and a few even blogged off it, but its not going to have the impact I want.
I might be coming to London and doing a masters and being exciting in October, but until then, with my boring call centre life, expect further furious blogging.
[...] blogs saying how well things were going. Phil at AVPS gave us an update on some steady growth, Left Outside told us it was going pretty well, and Sunny tweeted to reflect on the continued upward surge at [...]