Blog, blog, blog

Being the immediate results person I am, I have been analyzing the traffic to my site to see if I can see any trends. Really, I am looking for good news. Are people reading the blog? It seems like I am getting traffic, but I have no idea how good it is. I am pulling between 20 and 30 unique visitors including 3-4 return visitors a day to the site. Since I have only been online for a for month today, I have no idea what that means. Yes, I realize I already had a post called One Month Summary, but I actually started blogging on January 18, 2006. My question is: Is that decent traffic for one month? Should I be getting more? What is the typical ramp up time? What is considered "good" traffic. My hypothesis is that I am getting fairly typical traffic and only on very rare occasions do you build a regular readership. Of course, I have no empirical data to back up this assumption. But I think if blogs were analyzed it would turn out that 10% of the blogs account for 95% of the traffic. I would be happy to run such a study - anyone want to fund it? To continue with my theory, I think it grew up out of bulletin boards and newsgroups. People could have a venue to voice their opinion to a potentially large audience, but still remain anonymous. Even if everything you say on a blog is absolutely true, who cares. What are the odds that anyone you know will accidentally happen upon your blog? And if they do, you can always tell them you are working on your "creative writing". Then, in stepped the marketers. They saw an opportunity to capitalize on a very desirable demographic and they pounced on it. Think about all the products that I talked about in previous blogs. All of them are geared to us, the bloggers, to sell to other bloggers. We all put Adsense in our blogs so we can make money. Ninety percent of the blogs I visit have the obligatory list of icons for the blog directories. Hit counters, RSS readers, content fillers, games, dictionaries, Adwords, survey widgets, cartoons and a myriad of other "tools" are plentiful, easy to use and found by the advertisements in our blogs or by using the search window most of us seemed to have incorporated to our blogs. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love blogging. It is a great hobby, you can do it without spending a ton of money, really without spending much money at all. There are a significant number of people that see blogging or as an outlet for their creative talents. Some of us are doing it for that reason, but also in the hopes of being recognized for our talents. A select few of us are even going to make a living doing this. Even fewer will strike it rich or get famous and get to appear on the Today show. Some extremely talented few will be recognized without even trying. But for those of us trying to make it more than just a hobby, I think it is much like the lottery, you have to participate, some people will win and the rest of us will keep buying tickets and dreaming our dreams about what happens to us if we happen to be the one. Tags: Fiction, Online Book, Rebeleyeball, Paul Gavin Copyright (c) 2006 Paul Gavin. All rights reserved.