Blog Birthday
A year ago, at 19:18 in the evening, I posted my first entry on this blog. Blogging soon became one of my favourite pastimes, and I've been posting a bit more than one entry a day on average. Half a year ago in June, I was feeling a little glum about the readership figures. Little did I know that this was a vacation slump -- the blog's been booming ever since. This has been due to a combination of a) my hosting of popular blog carnivals, b) the increasing number of hits from Google searches on sundry themes as the blog's Google ranking rises (it's currently 4/10) and I type more potential search terms into the thing. Simply put: after a year of blogging, the chance is greater that I've used the words someone happens to search for.
Readership: the median number of daily unique readers for the past two weeks is 207, of whom 38 are returning readers. These figures are highly dependent on whether I've been hosting any carnivals: for October they were 225 and 59. Very few regulars seem to read the blog on a daily basis, so to hazard a guess I'd say there should be about a hundred regulars who check in at least once a week. But it's still a bit of a mystery to me why the regulars count doesn't grow. It's not that I don't promote the blog, and it's not that the blog attracts no new regulars. My guess is that I'm losing one regular for every new one that joins us, and that this means that people get tired of reading this blog after a while, even if they really like it at first. Perhaps they lose interest when they find out that I don't concentrate heavily on archaeology and skepticism? Or, more optimistically, they may get tired of reading blogs at all.
Links: on Technorati, with links from 171 individual sites in the past six months, Salto sobrius is currently ranked about number 19 000 out of 63 million. It's the number four archaeology blog and the number five skepticism blog on the web.
Comments: keep 'em coming! And I still haven't seen any requests. You know what to do. Actually: if you're a returning reader, please comment on this entry and tell me what kind of material you'd like to see more of. You can be anonymous if you want to.
[More blog entries about blogging; blogga.]
Labels: blogging
posted by Martin at 14:17
5 Comments:
Congratulations!
I'm quite impressed with your blogging - do you have any spare time left at all?
Usually I check your feed manually 2-4 times a week, and the headlines there have a huge impact on my decision to either have a look or to stay away...
I would like to see more pictures and more archaeology, even though I enjoy your occasional rants off topic.
[Todays word verification word: "nvvvt". That is probably one of the more popular search terms ancient romans would have used regularly, had they had the need to circumvent net-nannies and porn filters when looking for smut on the www, had it been invented [The joke only works in english]]
[UPDATE: It didn't verify, the new word I was given is: "eidtarty". Depending on how you hyphenate this word it either relates to a special way of acting artsy-fartsy (& provided that your name is Eidt) or another (also very special) way of acting on the last day of the ramadan, which I'm not going to describe in detail!]
Thanks! I guess my trick is to use the time other people put into television and DVDs for blogging and reading (on screen and paper).
You check the feed manually but you only see the headlines? Does that checking involve an RSS reader, or do you simply use your web browser?
More pix and archaeology, I can do that.
A VVV rating is only half as dirty as an XXX rating!
I've got to keep an eye on my Muslim neighbours to see if any of them suddenly become eidtarty.
PAJDIGB!
I use my browser.
I guess a feed reader would be like television and DVDs to me.
"Ozzmwh!"
Because I don't do television either.
I'm not surprised. A non-interactive, non-social medium where your choice of what to receive is at best vaguely thematic? Not very tempting...
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