Be a popular blogger

Not that I spend a lot of time on stats or hits or anything, but as an “analyst-type person” I can assure you it’s important to set success criteria and metrics. Therefore, for the purposes of this task, I have decided (for myself at least) to define “popular blogger” against the statistic of 110 million blogs published (live and dead based on Q4 2007 estimate) with the top 1% (11 million) of these blogs averaging about 20 regular readers and 300 unique hits per day. Thus, averaging those numbers for a significant timespan (I’ll arbitrarily choose any 30-day span) seems like a reasonable definition of “popular” to me.

Not counting spiders and syndicate sites, my numbers are currently 12 regular readers (who according to my logs visit the site or hit the feed at least five days per week – and at least eight of whom I have identified and know personally – thanks guys) along with an average of about 30 unique visitors per day. Since the latter number is directly proportional to the number of references I make to obscure sexual acts (see previous posting about goat nipple electrocution), I will also remove the “over-empowered monkey-spanking teenager demographic” from my calculations when monitoring my success.

So, in short, it looks like I’m only about 10% towards my overall goal, and I should probably be finding ways to make myself interesting to people (or at least search engines) besides quoting a bunch of statistics. But in the meantime, I just need eight of you to subscribe to my feed.

2 new subscribers this week. Unfortunately there has not been any controversial subjects like last month, so my traffic is doen from last month, but still up from the previous months.

Feedback Log
Data as of: 12/21/2005 10:27 AM
Data for: Today Week
eProps 0 14
Comments 0 7
Guestbook 0 0
Subscriptions 0 2

Feedback Log
Data as of: 12/9/2005 10:19 AM
Data for: Today Week
eProps 0 50
Comments 0 29
Guestbook 0 0
Subscriptions 1 2

I don’t know if I’m going to come close to last month though.

Total subscribers up to 23.

I have a special feature coming up soon. “The 12 memories of Christmas”.

Data as of: 11/19/2005 10:07 AM
Data for: Today Week
eProps 0 88
Comments 0 53
Guestbook 0 0
Subscriptions 0 2

I’m pretty happy about that. Yesterday was the busiest commenting day ever. The previous few days had a good amount of traffic also.

http://www.xanga.com/jhartsell

Another subscriber today. Another zillion left to go.

Well, no new subscribers. I’m at 16, although I am seeing an increase in my hits.

271 visitors and about 450 hits for the week. Not too bad, and those exclude my ip addresses.

Someone spent over 2 hours on my site reading today, went to like 18 pages or something.

http://www.xanga.com/jhartsell

The graph shows the increase this month, and the month is only about 1/2 over.

1 new subscriber yesterday! Yeah! Thats 3 for the week.

I love sharing my writing with people, and Xanga is a perfect way to reach a lot of people.

About 2 months ago I decided that I would try to commercialize my blogging by opening up a co-blog via blogger. Well, I really have gotten to the point now that for the last month or so I’ve been a blogging machine and really enjoying it. It definitely is better than my goal of “Earn $5 a day from adsense”. The joy of seeing a new subscriber, a comment, or more visitors is definitely more valuable to me than a monetary reward.

Now, how to quantify this goal as “complete”....I am at 15 subscribers right now, when I reach 100 subscribers I’ll mark it complete. Alternatively, if I begin to average over 250 hits a day I’ll also mark it complete.

Also, I am now officially taking my homepage link back to Xanga from Blogger on here. So pay me a visit… http://www.xanga.com/jhartsell .