Sep 13 2010

Surge

Blogging is such a random thing sometimes.  You can write a long dissertation on some topic you think is critical and get nothing but crickets chirping in the comments area; but then a one-off joke or video will inspire conversation. Angel’s posts on her yogurt maker and military experiences consistently get more traffic than anything I’ve written—much more than my own post on making yogurt, if that makes sense.  You just never know what’s going to be popular.

Of course, I do it all wrong.  You’re supposed to research topics and keywords so you know you’re writing about things people are searching for.  I don’t do that; it’s hard enough to get the writing done without spending time on keyword research first.  I also don’t post consistently; I post in flurries with dry spells in between, so people stop checking for new stuff.  I post on all sorts of topics that interest me, instead of focusing on one niche to build a dedicated audience.  (But what are you supposed to do when you’re interested in twenty different topics—have twenty different blogs?  When do you sleep?)  I don’t promote my blog through social media services like Twitter and Facebook, and I don’t have all the latest social media widgets to help other people promote it for me.

So it’s really no surprise that I plug along with a couple dozen visitors a day, and I don’t worry too much about it. It’s a place to do some writing when I get the time and ambition to do it, and a place to announce future projects and things.  But it is fun when something unexpected happens, like when I checked my traffic stats for the first time in a couple months and saw this:

Blog Traffic Graph

Blog Traffic for Last 30 Days

From an average of 25 people a day to 1,198?  Yowza.  Naturally the first question is what were they looking at, and it turned out to be my post on how to treat an introvert.  That pleases me, since that’s an article I put a lot of effort into.  It turns out someone with a lot of followers at StumbleUpon linked to it, and hence the deluge. Too bad I wasn’t writing anything fresh for them to see while the big surge was coming in. Most of it tapered off pretty quickly; but although you can’t tell it in the graph, traffic has stayed up around 60-70 visitors a day, more than double what it was before the big spike.  Some people are still trickling in from that link, so I guess I should start writing some things to keep them around.  Maybe a second article on being an introvert?  I could call it, “How to Treat Your Introvert Part II:  We Mean It, Stop Asking Us If Something’s Wrong Already.”

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