The audience
for this blog has reached another record high point: in November 2014, more
than 20,000 people viewed a page. Three times during the month, daily numbers
reached or exceeded 1,000, and the all-time number is approaching 400,000. In
fact, I fully expect to reach that by next week. If things keep going the way
they have been, even without any more growth, it will have reached half a
million by June.
Here’s the
graph from Blogger. You can see that I started blogging in March 2006, but I
didn’t post very much at first. I published seven posts in March, mostly reused
material like reviews of printers, cameras and other communications technology.
But by May, the frequency had dropped to once every week or two. I didn’t
publish anything in June, just once in August and nothing all that fall. I only
published six posts in all of 2008 and only one in 2010.
It’s not
surprising that my blog got little attention then. Why would anyone come when
there’s nothing new to see?
It wasn’t
until 2011 and I had finished writing my first novel, The Bones of the Earth, that I started blogging regularly. By that
fall, and most of the time since (with a few lapses, sorry) I was blogging at
least once a week. For a while there, I was doing three posts a week. And, not
surprising, that’s when pageviews started to climb.
That’s also
when I got my twitter account, and putting a link to my blog in most of my
tweets. Pageviews, driven by frequent announcements about posts and attracted
by new content, started to climb dramatically.
As you can
see from the graph, pageviews climbed in spurts. There’s the long, flat head
from 2006 to 2010, then a more or less steady rise through 2011, when pageviews
averaged around 6,000 per month—that’s 200 a day. There are peaks and valleys
from month to month, then another surge to another plateau around 10,000 per
month for most of 2012 and 2013.
And now, a
new high: from 13,734 pageviews in September 2014, to 16,548 in October to over
20,000 in November! And the pace so far in December (okay, I know we’re just
two days into it, but taking that as a trend) is over 700.
Getting the best help
What
accounts for that? I have to give some credit to Lisa Jey Davis, also known as
Ms. Cheevious. In addition to being a kick-ass lady and always entertaining
writer and blogger, she’s an awesome social media consultant. She created some
Facebook pages and posts for me, and is doing some other mysterious things in
social media on my behalf. And since she started doing that, my numbers have
been climbing strongly. In addition, the Army of Worn Soles page she created
for me on Facebook now has over 100 likes. To me, that’s a lot.
The view from the peak
I remember
being so excited in 2011 and 2012 as I watched my daily, monthly and “all-time”
pageview statistics climb. I remember thinking “Wow. Those statistics were
really pathetic before 2011, but now, this is serious.” I compared this to my
experience working on Canadian magazines (remember those things, printed with
ink on paper?) in the 1980s. Thirteen thousand readers per month was a
respectable, healthy readership for a “trade,” or industry magazine. With a
staff. And postage expenses. And here I was, getting those kind of numbers all
by myself.
A note here
about Google’s graph: the numbers I see today don’t jibe with my memory. And
the graph doesn’t show the odd-numbered years. You cannot see the statistics
for 2007, 2009, 2011 or 2013.
Why do I do it?
Three times
a week required an effort and a devotion of time that were too great to
sustain. Other things, like writing novels, began to suffer. So I scaled back
to twice a week for a while, and now am pretty content with once per week.
Now, if
there were only a way to make money from that. Don’t tell me about Google ads.
I have those, as you can see, and I haven’t gotten a penny. I’m not
complaining; that’s not why I write this blog.
“So why do you spend so much time on that blog
and on setting up tweets every day?” my lovely and supportive wife is fond of
asking.
I’ve used
the standard answers (that I am, umm, repurposing from consultants and self-described
authors’ advisors): “building the platform, raising my profile.” It’s partly
true, but as a method of driving book sales, well, I can’t say it’s had the
impact that other writers report.
But it does
show that I can get an audience. My writing is reaching important people: you.
Thank you,
readers.
