I want to personally thank all of you for such a great 2011! This blog and website has been in existence for over 10 years, but it was only this year that I decided to start taking it seriously.
Last January, I was averaging about 50 visits per day. This December, I averaged over 1400 daily visits. That’s a 2800% increase! While I could chalk this up to learning a lot about blogging (which I did), or learning a lot about theology and Scripture (some of which is documented on this blog), most of this increase is due to you – my friends and fellow blogger/writers in the online community.
Thank you all for being a part of the Till He Comes blog. I am looking forward to what we all learn together in 2012.
Here are some highlights from this past year:
The top ten blog posts of 2011:
- Writing Tips from C. S. Lewis
- Human Trafficking Must Stop
- The Daily Writing Routine of C. S. Lewis
- C. S. Lewis Did Not Like Church
- Murder in Church
- 31 Million Sex Slaves
- Matthew 12:31-32 – The Unpardonable Sin
- What if you spent one year obeying the entire Bible? A. J. Jacobs did exactly that
- Luke 7:31-35 – Be Childlike, Not Childish
- Luke 1:46-55 – The Songs of Christmas: Mary’s Song
Notice any trends? You all like C. S. Lewis, and some of you like to read sermon manuscripts. Hmmm… I wonder if I should focus more on such things in the future, as these are two of my passions as well.
The Top Ten Commenters from 2011:
Sam (324)
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Ant Writes (246)
Katherine Gunn (103)
bullet (87)
Kirk (68)
FedExMOP (65)
Swanny (63)
Clive Clifton (62)
B Crump (60)
Tim Nichols (56)
You make blogging worthwhile, enjoyable, and challenging. I wish I could give you some sort of gift or reward, and you are the ones who make this blogging community what it is. Thank you. (Some of you, by the way, need to get a Gravatar. 😉 )
I look forward to everything in store for 2012. It looks like it’s going to be quite a year for all of us!
Looking forward to what 2012 brings.
Hope you and your family have an awesome year!
Brian,
Same to you!
Happy New Year, Jeremy. Hope it bring renewed peace and deeper understanding for us all.
Happy New Year to you as well!
That’s an amazing result Jeremy, you must be very satisfied. Makes me wonder ….
1. How may are regulars (subscribing via RSS, Facebook or email) and how many are from Google or other blogs linking to you?
2. Presumably better Google ranking has to be part of it – do you know how you managed to improve that?
3. Do you have any impression of the mix – how many agree with you and keep returning and how many come to argue, or visit only once??
Just interested.
UnkleE,
There are very long answers to these questions… I will try to answer them in future posts over at GraceBlogger, which is where I occasionally write about what I am learning about blogging.
Here are the short answers: I currently have about 350 subscribers. I did a variety of things to grow this number, and I have some things to try in 2012 to increase it even further. I will try to write a post explaining this in more detail on Grace Blogger.
I do get a lot of visits from Google and other search engines. Only about 15% of my hits are returning visits. I work very hard at using good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices. SEO is a HUGE topic, and if you just try to learn 1-2 things per month, and implement them on your blog consistently, it pays off in the long run.
It seems that the majority of the people who comment agree, but there are the occasional ones who disagree.
Thanks. I have read your stuff on SEO, Facebook, Twitter, etc, at Grace Blogging and found it helpful thanks.
I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing “1400 visits” is actually 1400 pageviews (that is what WordPress stats provides I think – or are you using Google Analytics?), so that would be something less than that in actual visits. If we assume subscribers generally only make one pageview each visit (they have already read most things) but chance visitors may read only the page they land on, but may look around (say an average of 2 pageviews per visit), then we can guess that your average day includes 350 subscribers (you post most days) and about 500+ ‘drop-ins’, mostly from Google.
If that was all about right (a big ‘if’!), then Google is more important to your stats than are subscribers. But if the numbers were a little different (say subscribers read more than one page a day) then the two might be about equal. And if you are using Google Analytics and these are visits, then Google is much more important than subscribers.
Of course, stats isn’t really what it’s all about, but helping people and seeing change, but we can’t measure that!
Thanks again, it is all part of helping me!!! : )
Yes, you are right. I should have been more clear. 1400 pageviews. And no, this is from JetPack Site stats. I just checked my pageviews at Analytics…and it turns out they are a bit higher… nearly 1600 pageviews daily.
You are right about Google. I get about 500 pageviews daily from search engines.