I’m still sick, but I’m tired of it. I have enough energy to be vertical, but not enough to take on a project. So I end up being bored. After I’ve visited all my regular internet stops three times, I start poking around in my website statistics.
It turns out that my personal website sandra.tayler.com averages about 50 hits per month. This is the site where I host a few short stories and many blog entries turned essay. It also has a biography and a list of my current projects. It is essentially an online resume or business card. Most of the traffic that hits that website is directed there from this blog, but occasionally I get a big spike when Howard links to it. Since the site only has new content every month or so, I don’t expect it to have large amounts of regular traffic.
The Hold on to Your Horses site saw a huge spike of visitors when we launched it last June. Since then it gets about 190 visitors per month. The encouraging information is that more and more of these visitors are people who are either directly entering the URL or who are using search terms that make it obvious that this book was what they were looking for. I’m always particularly glad to see referring sites that aren’t either Howard or I. Interestingly, the TV appearance made almost no blip in website traffic, but the podcast interview was a top referrer for a couple of days. I suspect this is because the podcast was a much more in depth and relaxed discussion than the television interview. Another cool number is that the free PDF file of the Hold on to Your Horses book has been downloaded over 5000 times. So word is getting out. I just need to keep working to spread the word farther.
I don’t currently have a way of tracking the traffic on this blog. So I can’t make any solid guesses about readership here. Someday I’ll figure out how to track for informational purposes. I’m pretty sure that I accumulate readers faster than they wander away, but the growth is slow. This is fine with me. It means that the people who read, actually like what I write instead of just following a trend.
And now I need to walk away from my computer to go make dinner.
I gave the info about Hold on to Your Horses to our school librarian, so hopefully you’ll get a couple hits from that!
Also, it is possible that more people came over from the podcast because podcast listeners are internet people, but TV watchers are not necessarily, by definition.
Thank you!
That is indeed probable. Since the only way to get the podcast is off the internet, clicking over is very simple.
“I don’t currently have a way of tracking the traffic on this blog”
I’m addicted to Google Analytics. IIRC, they have code you can put in your template for Live Journal and generate stats. For your RSS feeds, you can use FeedBurner. My own stats are low but it’s fun to watch if you’re a data junkie like me 🙂
Google Analytics is what I use to track the other sites. I once poked around to see if I could put Analytics code on my LJ, but couldn’t see how to do it. I think that certain templates allow it, but others don’t. Or perhaps my ignorance is showing and I just don’t know where to look to insert the code.