I Crossed the 200 Hits/Day Threshold! Yayyy!!!!

Today I had record stats on my blog. I passed the 200 hits per day threshold.

Since Mitch Denny told me the kind of visitor numbers he got on his blog, I’ve been operating with a bit of an inferiority complex. At the time I was peaking at about 20 hits per day and at the time I was pleased with those levels. Since then (about 4 months ago) I have been trying to attract more visitors to the blog. I get a lot of fun out of writing the posts (and my mum reads some of them back in the UK) but in the end there’s not much point keeping a public weblog unless the public reads it.

I started watching which posts brought the most traffic, and unsurprisingly it was the ones that told readers in advance what they were going to read about. Obscure or humorous titles got nowhere. People want to know the topic before they expend the time and mental effort visiting the page. Choosing my titles and topics more wisely, and creating cross-links to well-known sites (such as Mitch’s) has helped a lot, as had search engine registrations (especially reddit which I had never heard of before). I also found that controversial-but-lite content (such as my Anti-Agile Gripe) got way more traffic than the more painstaking articles on configuration and LINQ series. I don’t know whether the LINQ series will get more traffic the closer to release Orcas gets?

I haven’t gotten much in the way of comments which has been disappointing – I can’t tell whether readers are just skimming through or reading the posts! I’m not sure what to do about that. Any ideas?

Dialogue & Discussion