One of the reasons I do this blog is to remind myself of how blogging works. WordPress‘ stats give me a live update of how many hits I’m getting and where the traffic is coming from. And because the numbers are very low it’s much easier to get a quick snapshot sense of what’s going on.
And when I say low I mean low. My blog really is at the very end of the long tail. Somedays the tail doesn’t wag at all, and I get no hits whatsoever. My best day ever has been 350 hits (mainly due to a link from Biased BBC). Tiny numbers.
I shouldn’t be surprised that a link from the sidebar of Nick Robinson’s blog to my blog post would bring me traffic (88 hits on one day last week). But it did surprise me that even though the conversation on Nick’s blog has moved swiftly on, yesterday I got another 87 hits, most of them from Nick’s blog.
Sometimes it seems like a wave. You don’t do anything, yet you still get traffic.
Linking, tagging and searching are the basic things that make blogs (and the internet) work. This is easy to forget, as blogging sometimes seems to be about what you write. It isn’t. It’s about how and how often you link and tag.
Nick Reynolds At Work 
March 5, 2008 at 9:45 pm
I don’t quite know what WordPress gives you in terms of stats.
My blog stats, in case you’re interested, were 11,000 page impressions in the last month; and the highest day was 543. That’s not much different from your highest, frankly – and I’ve had a blog for years! However, items in my RSS feed has been read a further 8,000 times (there have been 2,250 clicks from my RSS feed to my content). I therefore had 16,750 “unique views” in total, so that’s an average of 558 ‘hits’ per day.
Just like radio is multi-platform these days, so blogs are… don’t forget that your RSS feed might not appear in your stats.
All this is to say: “don’t be too disheartened with your stats”. After all, if I’ve got 550 people reading my blog every day, they’re clearly the 550 cleverest people in the world. (Or they can’t get onto any other websites.)
March 5, 2008 at 10:10 pm
[…] Reynolds-AM&i” owing to his previous name on the internal email list) posts a rather plaintive comment after reading his WordPress statistics… WordPress‘ stats give me a live update of how many […]
March 6, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Hi Nick. I’d be surprised if your unique user numbers were low due to the quality of your blog. Stats are definitely a double edged sword…
March 9, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Thanks.
I’m not worried that my stats are low. Makes them easier to understand.