One of the odd things about having a blog is that after a few years you get used to being read by the same handful of people. The luckier and better blogs than I have a bigger handful, but it’s still generally the same group.
To this day it weirds me out a little when I get a comment from an Unknown To Me Entity. It usually takes me a minute and then I’m all “Oh, yeah. This is the Internet.”
Apparently one of my Wall*E posts is in the top Google hits for “Wall E Propaganda”, which is why all of these strangers have been dropping in.
The good thing is that I’ve got enough of those type of posts that my blog has become largely self-sustaining. During the weeks when I don’t write anything I can still eke out about 150 hits a day with just the random posts that bring people here.
Not surprisingly the number one self-generating topic is the whole employment service/getting threatened with lawsuits fiasco from a year ago. I get about five comments a week and fifty hits a day from that one. Then there’s the dozen or so hits a day I get on the whole Battlestar Galactica / Bob Dylan mashup. And the Harry Potter’s Penis thing. Other posts, though, surprise me. I don’t know if they’re insecure girls or fetishists or magazine editors looking to make a point, but I get anywhere from five to fifteen hits a day on searches for “fat girl formals“; “what do fat girls wear to formals” and “dresses for fat girls.”
150 hits per day when you’re NOT writing anything? I don’t get it. This whole internet popularity contest is as dense to me as the real-life popularity contest that was high-school.
According to my sitemeter statistics, I get 27 hits per day and am very lucky to break 1000 in a good month. If I make one epic and interesting (to me) post, I’ll get 27 hits. If I make a bunch of little posts every day, I’ll get…. 27 hits. The only way I can make that number change is if I don’t post for awhile. After a day or two my readership will plummet to 5-10 per day. When I restart posting it’ll take as much as a week to ramp back up.
The only way I can cause a spike in my numbers is if I make a woodworking-specific post and then pimp it on a few of the woodworking discussion lists I frequent. The most I have gotten from one of these has been an incredible 150 views in one day- what you’re doing by not even posting!
Now, don’t get me wrong. If I were blogging just for the numbers I would have quit a long time ago. I rarely even look at my sitemeter stats (partially because I know the number will be 27!). But it’s been a total mystery why some people can write a few posts and get inundated consistently with readers (and not the “one-time” readers caused by, say, an instalance), while I can post up a storm and still never increase my readership.
Guess my writing isn’t interesting enough for the average netizen.
Jason
The thing is, it’s not that I’m “popular”…those 150 hits are just because I happened to have written something that touched a nerve with people who search.
Also, because of Google’s metrics, the more frequently a site is updated plays into how high it ranks in the search results. So the combination of having hot topics and frequent updates is what garners those 150 “lazy day” hits.
The other thing–as it pertains to you–is comments. Since your comment section (aka the bane of my existence) is iffy, it deters people from hanging out at your site.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve banged my head against the wall over your comment section. I want to leave comments–but it won’t let me.
If it makes you feel any better, my site hits only go up to about 500, no matter how much I write in a day. I know it sounds like a lot, but in the world of the internet 500 is nothing.
I thought the comments were working! I turned on “must be registered to comment”, but you’re on the list.
I’m going to try a little test and uncheck the “must be registered” button. I may get inundated with spam comments, but everybody else should be able to comment as well.
Rotten timing, tho. I won’t be posting for a little while.
I don’t know what it says about my writing, but my hits generally go up when I don’t write a post for a few days (except for the weekends when I generally don’t post anyhow). It’s a strange phenomenon, but usually if I haven’t posted in 2 days I’ll see a small, but noticeable, bump in traffic.