Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Strangely reducing hits

Today, out of interest, the hits on the blog were examined. Until a while ago, the hits had been building pretty steadily from a few at the beginning to between 150 and 250 a day. Since blog posting became more sporadic due to work commitments, visitor numbers have plummeted. This is a little disconcerting as it would indicate that viewer are not reading the blog for content but rather viewing to see whether there's anything new posted.

Having said that, there does seem to be an increase in search terms that seem to be finding the blog. That's very useful. As stated before, searches that locate the blog are of much more personal interest than anything else; it indicates people are finding the blog because of the content rather than because it has been mentioned some place or other.

It was said a while ago that the way to get blog readers was to create content and lots of it. This is something that really, doesn't work. Like so much that masquerades as advice, it's not bulk that makes the difference but quality. As any student knows and as many have found to their regret, brevity is to be preferred over verbosity. Anybody can write a thousand Twitter messages in a day and then combine them as an article. It takes skill though to write an article from start to finish. Again, short but informative articles seem to work best.

Comparing this blog to the other blog of www.britishphotographer.blogspot.com, it would appear that enough people simply find that blog without listing it anywhere. That blog has not been updated in some 7 months. Viewer numbers are constant at around 30 a day. Thus if one was to compare that with this blog and its fluctuating figures, it would seem that fresh posts attract the wrong kind of viewer.

I'll split viewers into two - the desired and the undesired. The desired hunt for content and read a single blog entry on it before moving on. The undesired hunts for fresh content then moves on. Its quite possible that the vast majority of the fresh content scanners are not actually human but rather content bots.

In light of the hits largely being bots, the number of hits and any changes up or down really does not look all that interesting. Perhaps it's getting back to the old adage of nothing online being worth a hill of beans and more especially so when it comes to statistics and figures.

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