2018 blog stats

Every year since 2010, I’ve written a post summarizing the year on this blog. Here are the highlights for 2018.

My posts from years past about healing my injured sacroiliac joints have gotten a lot of comments in 2018 from people who are also suffering, and that has brought the most gratification this year, to know that documenting my healing journey offers hope to others.

To summarize that journey, I saw many practitioners in various bodywork modalities for a couple of decades before finding one who truly understood what it would take to heal the injury. I followed her advice, and it worked. My final post, Sacroiliac joint healed!, published in 2017, includes links to all my previous posts on the topic.

In 2018, I had 94,239 visitors and 127,235 views. This is down a bit from 2017, even though I wrote more posts in 2018. I’m attributing the downturn in visitors and views to social media burnout.

Social media has been a fun new toy — and more people are seeking balance in their lives. I’m actually fine with it, as I’m seeking balance too. Writing fewer posts but having them be more germane to how we can live better lives works for me. Plus, I’m a bodyworker and wellness advocate by trade. Less text neck, eye strain, forward head posture, and sitting are better for your health. I want you to be healthy!

I wrote 32 blog posts in 2018, totaling 16,319 words, averaging 510 words per post, a bit shorter than I typically have written.

Of the posts I wrote this year, these have gotten the most views (listed newest to oldest):

The most-read post in 2018 was one first posted back in January 2014, How to drink water with lemon and preserve your tooth enamel. It’s gotten the most comments of any post I’ve ever written. Believe it or not, almost 5 years after it was first published, 40,960 people read that post in 2018. I hope they/you are preserving their/your tooth enamel!

At the end of 2018, I have 292 followers on WordPress, 92 on email, and 605 on social media. Thank you!

The most popular day and hour for reading my blog is Sunday at 2 pm.

And now (drum roll), where are readers from? Well, it looks like this:

  • all of North America except Greenland
  • all of South America except for one tiny country north of Brazil (French Guiana)
  • all of Europe except Svalbard islands
  • all of Asia except Iran, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan
  • most of Africa except Western Sahara, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia
  • I imagine there are some tiny island nations that don’t appear on the map with no readers

As always, it astounds me how connected the world is now because of the internet.

One of my intentions for 2019 is to improve my writing. I’d like to write a monthly post but have each be more interesting, compelling, and shareable.

Thank you so much for reading!

Blog stats for 2017

Happy 2018! I’m back from a few days in the stunning big-sky big-earth desert/mountain landscape of Big Bend National Park, with a brief boat-and-burro-ride into Boquillas, Mexico.

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Nature sure helps put my monkey-mind concerns into perspective. Hikes, hot springs, camp food, company, solitude, and nourishing views, views, views.

On the return trip of about 9 hours, I drove into a spectacular cold front featuring a wall of low clouds made of freezing mist that I could see miles ahead of me. Continue reading

Blog stats for 2016

Well, folks, I broke 100,000 views in 2016, something I never dreamed of when I started this blog at the tail end of 2009. This little blog got 108,999 total views in 2016. In 2015, I got 51,449, so views more than doubled last year.

screen-shot-2017-01-04-at-9-33-44-pmIt started in January. Total views jumped to over 10,000 per month. The main driver seems to have been a single post, How to drink water with lemon and preserve your tooth enamel. That post got 52,433 views in 2016, and only 10,715 in 2015. First published in January 2014, it only got 209 views that entire year.

I’m guessing that starting in January 2015, people were drinking lemon water, felt something different going on in their mouths, and they got concerned, Googled, and found my post. I wish I knew more about why that post went viral. Did WordPress feature it? Did it get reblogged elsewhere? Who linked to it? It’s a mystery to me.

So 2016 turned out to be the year of preserving tooth enamel. In response to the interest, and after a visit to my dentist, I wrote another post, Rebuilding tooth enamel after drinking water with lemon, in June 2016 that got 2,148 views last year. That was the only top post I actually wrote in 2016.

There was also a lot of interest in the posts Recovering from a virus, recovering from adrenal exhaustion, My experience with brainwave optimization, and Healing bruised, strained toes, which round out the top 5 posts for 2016.

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Continue reading

How to get 100,000 views on your blog

Sometime in the early hours of December 13, 2013, my blog received its 100,000th view. My first post went up on December 30, 2009, so it took just short of four years to pass that milestone.

I think that perhaps that establishes this as a successful blog!

Some of the keys to getting there have been: Continue reading

End-of-year blog stats for 2012

I’m winding up my third year of blogging, getting ready to move into the fourth year, so it’s a good time to summarize.

View and visitor data

In 2012, my blog was viewed over 48,000 times, averaging 134 views per day. That’s up from 23,000 total and 63 average in 2011. Readership continues to grow. Thank you.

I had my best day ever, 580 views by 206 visitors, on Monday, December 10. That was far above average, and I still don’t know what made it different. I’m curious and happy!

(FYI, each page/post viewed per day per device counts as one view. WordPress just started tracking visitors this month, so I won’t have meaningful data on visitors for awhile.)

Most popular posts of 2012

  1. Home page/archives (the blog was my home page for most of the year)
  2. Update on my Spartan trailer
  3. Trauma releasing exercises
  4. Tattoo art on yogis
  5. The starfish story: making a difference
  6. The Well Ashiatsu and Massage (my new home page as of the latter part of this year)
  7. Each moment, life as it is, the only teacher: quotes from Joko Beck
  8. How do you get your energy back after having the flu?
  9. The left brain right brain crossover
  10. What you need to know about standing desks

Many of these posts appeared before 2012, but The starfish story and The Well Ashiatsu and Massage were new. Other new popular posts in 2012 included The heart’s energy field, Breaking a habit: change the cue and reward first, and the routine will follow, and The 12 Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening. Posts on current yoga controversies (injuries and scandals) got quite a few views as well.

Where views came from

blog views by county, 2012

blog views by county, 2012

Since Feb. 25, 2012, when WordPress began tracking where views came from, over 27,000 views have come from the U.S., followed by Canada and the UK with about 2,500 each. Australia, India, Germany, South Africa, Ireland, Netherlands, and New Zealand round out the top 10 countries. Hi, y’all!

I had no views at all in 2012 from Greenland, Bolivia, Cuba, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Somalia, several west and central African nations. and a few very tiny ones.

Most popular search terms

Almost 30,000 views came through people using search engines, mostly Google. (This is why tagging is so important.) These were the most popular search terms:

  1. yoga tattoos
  2. spartan trailer
  3. trauma release exercises
  4. spartan carousel
  5. starfish story
  6. yoga tattoo
  7. spartan trailers
  8. spartan carousel for sale
  9. standing desk height calculator
  10. glenn black yoga

Other search terms that got viewers here included:

  • sitting unhealthy
  • jobs that are not sedentary
  • constructive things to do
  • 100 naked people
  • tantric broad

Surprisingly, several search terms used the Russian and Turkish alphabets. I have no idea what the English equivalents are.  I had 125 views from Turkey and 70 from the Russian Federation, so I goess they found something of interest. 

Clicks and ads and earnings

If you enter Amazon through links on this blog and make a purchase, I get a small percentage of whatever you buy, through a program called Amazon Associates. Amazon got 973 clicks from this blog in 2012.

From those clicks and subsequent sales, I earned all of $110 in 2012.

Don’t ask how many hours I put into this website. I don’t track my time, but I’m sure it averaged at least a couple of hours per week, and often double that. $110 for 104 hours (52 x 2) works out to about $1 per hour. Hmmm.

I have yet to be paid a cent for allowing ads on the blog. I’ve earned $54.37 since February 2012, when I began allowing ads, but the minimum payout is $100, so I’m still waiting for a deposit.  Frankly, I’m not sure advertising is worth the aesthetic drag and distraction, and I worry that some company whose values I disagree with (like Monsanto) will advertise.

If that happens, please let me know as soon as possible, so I can quit taking ads.

Blogging is a labor of love for me. It would be nice to make more money at it (with integrity, of course). I consider writing projects from time to time that could bring in  income, but so far I haven’t followed through. I believe that could change!

Other data

I end 2012 with:

  • over 75,000 views total
  • 313 followers (156 at the end of 2011)
  • 727 total posts
  • 2,250 tags
  • 576 comments (including my replies to commenters)

It’s been a good year. Thank you for reading me!