Archives for January 2008

2007 was an amazing ride. Career-wise, it was the best year of my life. In the beginning of that year I resolved to break away from more traditional forms of writing to become a full-time professional blogger and I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. How can I top that in 2008? By following two important rules:

1. There’s Always Room for Improvement

Just because I’m successful doesn’t mean I should stop learning. In fact, when it comes to blogging I don’t feel I’m very knowledgeable at all. Oh sure, I’m pretty good at building a community and writing for a specific group of people, but I’m technically challenged and need to study up more on blog design plus monetization and traffic-building strategies. I think anyone who wants to succeed as a blogger needs to learn to never stop learning. Fortunately for all of us, there are some terrific resources available.

2. Set One Realistic Goal

While I do have a short list of New Year’s resolutions, I also believe it’s important to set one realistic goal each year. Last year my goal was to earn a full time salary as a professional blogger. This year it’s my goal to learn more about the technical aspects of blogging. I’d like to troubleshoot my own issues without having to call in the Calvary for tweaks and fixes.

I’m not perfect. I know I have a lot to learn. For me, the key is not to do it all. If I focus on one goal, while continuing to learn as much as I can about my chosen path, I can continue to be what I consider a success.

What is your one realistic goal for 2008?

And blogging is a long distance race isn’t it? Just about every day for months or years you are going to get up and go to the keyboard. Look at your stuff. Be happy. Be sad. Be indifferent. So many emotions come into play when the blog runner puts on his or her shoes and hits this pixel packed purgatory in full stride. But the WWW will never become the PPP! Believe me I tried it yesterday and all I got was a blog dedicated to a polar bear in a snowstorm.

But that’s not what we want to discuss today. Here are the charts that will help us (I hope) discover how many folks are with us for the long haul. And is their number growing?

Do you like the graduated tint? I have been playing with Google’s photo editor for so long I can’t stop. Be happy there are not little snowmen sliding down the graph on their sleds.

The first graph gives you a summary of what happened in the month of December. And it shows a constant flow of about fifteen visitors except on the day when it wasn’t working. That would have been the day I added a premium template and forgot to do some other things.

I used to assume that these visitors represented maybe 3 or so regulars and 7 or so one time visitors. Notice that the unique visitor count is about two thirds the number of visits. Whenever I look at visits I calculate a number that is one third less in order to try and calculate the actual number of readers. Did anyone say this is an exact science? And here is the second graph.

Here we see how things may really be happening. During this month we see some of these readers moving down the path to become longterm readers. How many? Well there were about 125 visits so I calculate one third less or about 82 actual people came back ten times or more during December. Does that make sense?

I had been assuming that the 3 regulars every day were the same regulars. But what if some of the regular readers were only coming by once or twice per week? Then there would be more of them in total.

That’s a lot different than 3 regular readers and 7 one time visitors. And the graph indicates that a few more are migrating down this pathway all the time. Does that mean that every 10 weeks there will be 85 more longterm readers? In 10 weeks I have not gathered enough statistics to tell but we can revisit this situation in another month. Grab a RSS handle and find out!

In a year could there be 85 times 5 (52 weeks divided by 10 weeks equals approx. 5) readers? Maybe not. Some will fade away. But I spend ten minutes per day on this blog and the idea that it may attract even one hundred regular visitors is surprising. The idea that it could have a thousand regular readers in just two years is simply astounding!

So young blogging grasshopper remember to look deeper into your statistics and see what may be happening there. Someone once said it takes a year or two to build a productive blog. It is clear from this example that it may be so. And imagine what could happen if you spend more than ten minutes per day on your blog! Isn’t that exciting!