Keeping track of my blog statistics isn’t one of my favorite activities, but I force myself to take a look a few times a year. And one of my goals every year is to improve my blog statistics (first time and returning visits, unique visits, and pageloads). I mean, I’d probably write this blog even if nobody came, but it’s fun to see where the traffic comes from (Australia, France, even South America), and although haven’t yet figured out what to change to bring in more readers, it’s been gratifying to see the year-over-year growth.
This year (in May, to be exact), I switched blog hosting sites (from Blogger to Word Press) and changed my whole writer platform. The first thing I noticed was that I stopped getting comments; in fact, non in the past several months. And then I started getting all these followers (hundreds!) from places that made no sense (countries where English is not widely spoken). I finally figured out they were bot crawlers; non-human applications which sign up to websites and look to get added to your mailbox as a legitimate ‘person’ so they can avoid spam filters and sell your email address. I never had any problem with those on Blogger, but once I took care of those, my stats fell off to a trickle. I told myself it didn’t matter, since they weren’t ‘real’ followers anyway.
But when I checked the statistics today, I felt pretty good.
- In November of 2012, my Blogger Blog had 411 pageloads, 145 unique visits, and 30 returning visits.
- In November of 2013 my Word Press Blog (with only 6 months activity) had 827 pageloads, 188 unique visits, and 130 returning visits.
I don’t know how or why it happened, and I’m finding it pretty hard to believe, but this year is definitely an improvement over the 2012. Now I know I’m no John Scalzi or Hugh Howey or anybody like that, but thanks for coming. Tell your friends.
We’re open all night.
