Wistful Thinking
Feb 11th, 2008 by mark
Like any self-respecting nerd with a website, I have a statistics package that tracks visits and page views on my site, and produces graphs and tables and other suitably nerdy artifacts for me to drool over. My package of choice is Mint, from Shaun Inman. (Check out the excellent review by Shawn Blanc.)
My visit numbers are amazingly consistent and, not too amazingly, small. My site is about me and pretty much for me. There are a few informational postings that have garnered visits, but the vast majority of the postings are about me as a person, or the events in my life. Still, I average five or six hundred visits a month, and have for the two years I’ve been using Mint.
Since the beginning of this year, and the adoption of Wordpress as my CMS, I have had a slight bump in these numbers. While I can’t find a logical correlation between switching frameworks and increased visits, I am pleased that I am getting more daily visits, and higher numbers overall.
All of which brings me to my point today. Every time I refresh my Mint page (always open in a tab of its own) I wonder the same thing briefly in the back of my mind, “Will this be the day that my site takes off?” And for a few seconds while the page reloads I can imagine what it would be like to see several hundred visits for the day instead of a couple dozen.
[...] Wistful Thinking - Every time I refresh my Mint page (always open in a tab of its own) I wonder the same thing briefly in the back of my mind, “Will this be the day that my site takes off?” And for a few seconds while the page reloads I can imagine what it would be like to see several hundred visits for the day instead of a couple dozen. [...]
Nice site…I know how you feel wishing that your site will take off
Howdy, I just came here from Blanc’s site. I just subscribed as well. I am sure if you write more informative posts, people will flock. Anyway, you have one new reader.
Good luck
The slight bump is probably due to Wordpress’ better SEO department.
Nice post. I also use Mint and like you look forward to the day where I see a proper spike. Just once. That would do nicely. Probably never happen as I would need some good content first but it’s nice to dream.
Possibly today is YOUR day.
A sudden serious spike in traffic after months of maybe a couple dozen visits per day really gets your heart racing. I wrote a little freeware application a couple of months ago that got mentioned on a couple of Mac blogs, and all of the sudden Mint was showing several thousand visits within a few hours. Really woke me up! That kind of volume didn’t stay around, but I’ve had consistently more traffic since then.
@John Ronsse, I think you are right. Not only was my site under an ancient version of MT (2.661), I hadn’t refreshed the meta information in ages either.
@Kit - thanks. I hope to write some more informative posts soon.
@Charles - Heart racing, palms sweating, the whole bit. Like you say, it may not last, but wow, what a ride it is today.
@Rafael - Yes, it certainly seems like it. Time to go buy a lottery ticket.
I think one thing to do is look @ your Mint install and see what kind of search terms are getting people to your site. Obviously you have some sort of authority on these issues. Write about them more! People will come, and eventually you’ll be in business.
Out of curiosity, what CMS did you use before switching to WordPress?
Also, I was directed here from Shawn Blanc. Sometimes that reciprocal affection does work, eh?
@Ian - I was using MovableType (v 2.661) before switching to Wordpress. And, yes, reciprocal affection does indeed work.
@Daniel Andrews - The most popular searches are for ‘zanshin’ and ’shotski’s ring.’ I’ve added them, plus a couple other frequently searched for or referred by terms to the ‘Popular’ section of my sidebar. As @Kit pointed out, more focuses and more informative posts will likely generate higher sustained traffic over time.
Great tagline, Mark.
Hey Mark, nice looking site!
I feel exactly the same as you do. I get a few extra hits around film festivals and big movie premieres, but I always wondered what it would be like to have a highly trafficked site on a regular basis.
That being said, I’ve added you to my blog folder.
[...] bookmarks tagged wistful Wistful Thinking saved by 5 others xLeow bookmarked on 02/14/08 | [...]