Somebody is Reading My Blog

I ran my log files through a stat analyzer today along with some of my other sites, and came across an interesting revelation. People are actually reading my blog. This blog isn't getting huge traffic, but much more than the 5 or 6 regulars that I was aware of before yesterday. On any given day, about 200 unique people are visiting the site. The number fluctuates between 150 and 250, with a high of close to 400. The number of page views varies pretty greatly, with the high point being about 750 page views in any given day.

This isn't a webmasters dream or anything like that. I've seen traffic spikes around 70,000 visitors in a day on another site I have - but the interesting thing is that I've done no promotion for this site. I haven't even really told my friends and family about this site outside of a handful of people. I didn't want to, really - at least until it transformed into what I deem a production-ready site.

I have done a few SEO-ish things here, but really just simple things that I prefer to do anyways - like having the filenames named appropriately. I've been fairly good about keeping updates coming, but my subject matter has varied pretty dramatically really based on what I've been thinking about on any given day when it comes time to blog.

I rank highly for a lot of terms that I would think either carry no traffic or would be not competitive at all. If you do a search at live.com for "what would i look like as a south park character", I'm number one. Funny, I wouldn't think anybody would search for that particular term, but sure enough I have gotten visits.

It just goes to show that for small webmasters one of the real keys is to keep plugging away. Keep the site updated and you will end up ranking for a lot of terms that you really hadn't thought of. Don't think in terms of traffic volume, think in terms of subject matter that your visitors may be interested in. Certainly focused efforts on ranking certain pages within your site can provide a significant boost in traffic, but all the little 1-a-day searches can really start to add up - especially if you can retain those visitors.

I suppose I'm going to start paying a little more attention to what I write about, but at least for today you still end up getting the random thoughts that are running through my head in the middle of the night.