6,000 and Counting

I started blogging in October of 2010 and fell in love with it. I started this blog because, Alex, the boy my daughter was dating encouraged me to start one. He had made one for school and was really enjoying it, so I thought I would give it a try. I am so happy I did. I turns out that I love blogging.

I don't know how much other people like my site, but I really enjoy it. It has been a great release. Plus, I get to have fun being creative and telling stories. Sometimes the posts were funny (or meant to be), sometimes confessional and occasionally reminiscent. Some of them I labored over and others I just cranked out before I went to bed. Either way, I wish I had started doing this years ago.

The pictures don't always have to make sense!

The beginning of this month marked just over 14 months of me pounding on my keyboard. My blog was visited about 4,500 times during that period. That averages out to just over 10 views per day. However, this month has seen a drastic change.

Today, I reached the 6,000 views mark. This means I've had about 1,500 views in the last three weeks. That is over 60 views a day. I've been blogging for 15 months and 25% of all the traffic I've received has come in the last month. Before this month it took me over 4 months to get that many views and now it has happened in 3 weeks. So what happened? I have some theories.

One of the causes for this was completely on accident. On January 4, a friend of mine (Adam) had a rather embarrassing medical issue. I took him to the emergency room and blogged about it the next day. That story became my most read post before the day was over. Adam sent the link out to all his Facebook friends and they swarmed in to see what he had been griping about on his Wall for the last 24 hours. This gave me a quick surge of about 400 views in a couple of days. This number may be common place for some bloggers, but for me, those numbers were huge.

On a side note, I want to make it clear that I don't just humiliate people because I have an audience on the web. After I wrote the blog, I saved it to be approved by Adam before it was posted. Once he gave me the 'OK', I published it. He received several phone calls and sympathetic comments on his Facebook wall for the next few days. While Adam did appreciate the extra attention his new-found fame had brought him, he unexpectedly found himself to be a bit distressed for approving the story. It was disconcerting for people to be so acutely aware of what most would have wanted to be a private experience. After telling me his concerns, I agreed that from this point forward if I write about any of his adventures or mishaps, he will be referred to as Stephen. He found that to be acceptable.

Versatile?
I think that is a nice way
of saying I can't focus
on any one thing.

While that post did provide me with a quick surge in my numbers, it was not the only thing I did. A few months back, I was given the 'Versatile Blogger' award (Thank you Brandie Boddie). Besides the prestige of receiving the award, I was to do something. The award required me to share a few things about myself and pass the award on to seven other bloggers. Unfortunately, I really wasn't reading many blogs. That was the second time this had happened to me. I received an award that I was supposed to pass on, but did not know who to give it to. I didn't want that to happen again, so I started looking for other blogs to read.

Once again, I wish that I had done this earlier, because there are some great writers out there. Some of my favorites are Creative Devolution, Crack You Whip, The Bloggess, The Cowardly Feminist, "Jen" e sais quoi, GweenBrick, Misadventures of the Monster Library, Mayor Gia, Pish Posh and Wait in the Van. This is in no way an exhaustive list. It is just a few of the blogs I have grown to love in the last month. There are many more, but these are the first ones that came to mind. I started thinking of some others, but I figured the list is long enough. To those people I listed, I love you all. Thank you for the opinions, laughs and words you have shared.

Now that I am actually reading other blogs, I have started seeing a huge increase in traffic. This was an unintended, but much appreciated result. After reading their posts, I always left a comment, because I know how much I love to get comments. I really want to know what my readers think of the post or what thoughts come to mind as they read it. It is frustrating to check my stats and discover that one of my posts has had 50 or more visits and no one left a comment, so I always leave one. I do this because I think it is nice and as a blogger I understand how much those comments mean to me. Because of those comments I left, many the blog owners come over to check out my blog and I even pick up traffic from some of their readers. Now, I am getting regular traffic to my site and didn't even mean to do it.

HOORAY for accidental victories!

Thank you to those of you who have been reading since the beginning and welcome to the new people I have met in the last month. I look forward to getting to know all of you better.

Let's see how long it takes to reach 10,000. Now that I have more traffic, I had better produce quality funny.