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
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.
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.)
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.
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:
Other search terms that got viewers here included:
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.
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!
I end 2012 with:
It’s been a good year. Thank you for reading me!
Yesterday this blog got 580 views. Today so far there have been 380.
Most days I get a lot fewer views. The average number of views per day in November was 109.
I have no idea why views spike like this. I can see that 120 views today were referred by links, including search engines, but that doesn’t explain 260 of the views.
I can also see on the site stats that my home page, The Well Ashiatsu and Massage, has been viewed 239 times today so far.
If you don’t mind, if you are reading this post, would you please tell me in the comments how you got to my site? I would love to be enlightened about this.
Sometime during the night, when July 3 was turning into July 4, my blog passed 50,000 views. I like milestones, and this one is pretty major! The fireworks tonight will have a little extra meaning for me because I am celebrating.
Who knew, when I started? It’s like relationships. No matter what promises are made, you don’t know if they’ll last until they do. There have been times when I’ve thought I had nothing to write about, and then something came up that I wanted to share. Early on, I had some connectivity problems and didn’t post for a couple of weeks, but since then, it’s rare for me not to post at least twice a week.
Since my last milestone posting in April, I’ve met with a psychic who told me that I’ve been a writer for many lifetimes, and that in one lifetime, I was a man who wrote with a quill pen.
I hope what I wrote was interesting, well-written, and effective. (Don’t you know I wish I knew the name of that previous self so I could look up his/my writings???)
Here’s a graphic from my WordPress dashboard displaying the views by month:
You can see how slow it was for the first year, 2010, when I averaged 11 views a day. It started taking off in 2011, and 2012 has been great, so far averaging 125 views per day.
I guess this really tells what it takes to be successful at blogging—that it takes time and consistent posting to build a following. The success is on my terms, too.
The most popular post of all time is an update on my Spartan trailer, which is off the wellness/aliveness topic. Search engines bring viewers interested in Spartan trailers here. Some may even stick around for the wellness stuff!
I wish I knew which posts were most popular with subscribers and regular readers, whom I believe are more interested in trauma recovery, health, wellness, and wisdom.
And okay, I am an eclectic blogger.
Subscribers and readers, what would you like to see more of?
WordPress began showing views by country in February 2012. Here’s an image of the top 10 countries for viewers since then:
You can see that over 10,000 of the 50,000 views have occurred since late February, by Americans. That’s pretty amazing!
The bottom of the list is equally impressive. It’s amazing to realize that I’ve had viewers from distant countries like Liberia, Fiji, the Faroe Islands, New Caledonia, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and Zimbabwe.
I don’t even know where New Caledonia is. Wikipedia tells me it’s a French archipelago east of Australia in Melanesia.
The Faroe Islands are Danish Islands halfway between Norway and Iceland.
Hello and welcome. The Internet really does make the world smaller.
There is no master plan for this blog, except to post what interests me. As I build my massage practice and continue to investigate the keys to wellness, including new discoveries about the ways to be healthy, I’m sure I will blog more on those topics.
I love hearing from you via comments, likes, and shares.
Thank you, readers, for stopping by here, and I especially thank those of you devoted enough to subscribe. You really make it worth my while.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 