Today marks my two month blogoversary. Time to take stock again (no, I'm not going to do this every month).
At the end of my first month, I had achieved my goal of 500 hits. At that time, I mused about setting a new goal, but never did. One month later, I'm at 1600 hits and rising. Since 500 hits per month was what I wanted to maintain, I think it's going pretty well.
As much as I'd like to believe that it's a result of my good looks, the amount of traffic I receive is largely due to referrals from two sources: Poliblog and Evangelical Outpost. Dr. Taylor over at Poliblog first gave me a nice write-up and link, which is probably the main reason I'm not still down in "Insignificant Microbe" status on the TTLB Ecosystem (at this writing, I'm a very high end Slithering Reptile). That earned me the notice of some of my most faithful readers and referers, such as Mac over at Stones in the Field and Scott Gosnell at Pro's and Con's.
The second big jump came when I got a nice write-up at Evangelical Outpost. Joe Carter sent a lot of new traffic my way, and a good deal of my new readership gets referred in from his site. Actually, twice now Joe has said nice things about particular posts. Thanks, Joe.
Of course, none of this should be read as detracting from some of the folks, particularly medievalists, who seem to have found their way to me on their own. Most of these seem to have made their way through Michael Drout's Wormtalk and Slugspeak and Lisa Spangenberg's Digital Medievalist.
I guess my novice status is still apparent, as evidenced by my recent troubles with Trackback (and the fact that I'm not trackbacking these links since I can't figure out how to TB a whole site as opposed to individual posts) and the loss of a few comments. Nevertheless, thanks for all the people above and many more unmentioned for having faith in the Wordhoard. I hope I'm able to send a little traffic back your way.
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Congrats on the anniversary. It's a nice blog. Don't feel bad about the "novice" stuff; you're a braver man than I, since I don't even bother with trackbacks!
ReplyDeleteI don't bother with trackbacks either. :) I was inordinately proud of myself just for learning to write enough html (just barely) to liven up my sidebar.
ReplyDeleteI just go to technorati once in a while, and check out who has linked me. :) (Which has varying degrees of accuracy, but works okay for my purposes.)
Happy anniversary, Doc--we're glad to have you here! WordHoard has become one of my daily blogs to check, and my morning coffee is always more enjoyable for it.
Trackbacks are pointless, really, aside from a lovely spam target. I speak not just as an opinionated medievalist, but as a genuine professional geek.
ReplyDeleteUse either sitemeter or Statcounter, free javascripts you paste in your Blogger template, to keep track of visitors and where they come from, and what they clicked on to get here, and such; these are substitutes for the more geeky referral logs or server stats you might use were you on your own server. Both are free, though the free version only tracks a limited number of users; I'm more fond of statcounter.com.
And you don't care about hits; hits simply mean a file was loaded into the browser; the text of a page is one hit and every single image counts as a separate hit. What you want are Unique Visitors; that's where all the geeky coolness comes from.
You might also sometimes go to google and google using the Advanced options, and then scroll down to the section Page-Specific Search; fill in the Links page with your URL, and you'll find pages that link to you.
*Sigh* At this rate, people will stop paying me for this stuff, and me with filing fees . . . ;)