From time-to-time I’ll run into another blogger or someone with a small website and the conversation will get around to traffic – how many visitors do you get?
Compared to Yahoo!, or Google, or my company’s website, I’m hardly a blip on the radar. Compared to other personal websites, I do pretty well (though I have taken a terrible traffic hit beginning the week before Christmas. I’m hoping it relates to the season, as opposed to my lack of compelling content).
My secret is twofold. First, there’s always fresh content. Maybe I shouldn’t force myself to write, but sometimes I do. I hope the forced entries don’t come off that way, but some probably do. In a perfect world, I’d have at least one entry per day.
The second is much more important. I try and make sure my site’s URL is always visible somewhere. If I post a comment on Slashdot or some bulletin board, I add my URL. I don’t post just to advertise, but I don’t hide the site either.
This increased visibility was one reason I submitted my blog to ctweblogs. The site is an agreggator of blogs, mostly from Connecticut (though not totally – and I’m not sure why).
I’ve found myself going to their site, looking to make sure my latest entry has been found, and then reading other blogs. To a large extent, these are personal sites I would have never seen.
It’s amazing to me how many people obsess about politics and government. They are nearly always stridently on one side of the political spectrum or the other. There don’t seem to be any hard hitting middle-of-the-road blogs.
A good number of the bloggers are angry. They know their position is right – why doesn’t the world see it their way? Maybe the blogs are a steam valve to keep these folks from bursting under their own internal pressure.
Dude, chill.
I’ve found enough interesting that I keep coming back.
Random thoughts: I use Bloglines for doing much of my blog reading. There are currently close to 350 blogs that I try to keep on top of, including this blog. Seven other people read your blog through Bloglines as well.
Depending on how busy things are and how interesting the post is, I may end up just reading the extract in the aggregator and never coming to your site. I believe a lot of people read blogs this way, so your numbers are probably better than the raw number of visits you see in your logs.