Measuring Success
Blogs. The internet is littered with the corpses of fallen. Often, you can look through their remains voyeuristicly to see whether they died a slow death, as updates came further and further apart, or if they were murdered one afternoon as a stream of regular posts came to a swift end, never to be continued. It’s one thing to watch a blog waste away to nothing but quite another to watch it die suddenly in the prime of its life.
We’re all friends right? Let’s be honest here, everyone has killed at least one blog. I started early, letting a couple long running Livejournals fade away, before moving on to a failed blogger, and aborted World of Warcraft blog, and even one on tiny houses that never really got started. We’ve all been there.
Everyone, feels this pain.
We’ve been keeping a steady stream of content pouring forth for a while now. So much so, that I’ve been complimented this week on my persistence in this matter. Twice. That’s why I was going to wait to make these kinds of posts till the blog had been going for about 6 months – to make sure, you know? Something really strange happened recently though, and I just couldn’t wait to share it with my loyal readers.
September was a good month for this blog. Though WordPress doesn’t give me unique visitors, it was kind enough to share that in this month, over there were over 4600 page views from 57 countries on this site. That’s peanuts for most blogs out there, but for a one month old page, still looking to attract readership to its niche topics, I think it is a huge success. In this same period, I can tell you that we got the most readers on September 15th, and that our most read posts were about Elfquest and Project Eternity. Further, Chris and I succeeded in posting every day (Two on one day), mostly on topics related to Kickstarter and Comic books.
I also kept an eye on Alexa, not because I want to start worrying about advertisers, but just because I was looking for other ways to gauge our progress. We started the month unranked, and made the charts at 19.9 million on 9/11; by the end of the month we had climbed 349,000 places further – good progress by my reckoning. This is where it gets weird. On the morning of October fourth, I checked our ranking, and it had gone up from 19.6 million to 10.5 million in one night. I’ve never heard of a jump like this before, and have yet to find a parallel on another blog, but there it is.
I was hoping to stick to the trend of 300,000/month as a climb rate – a 10 million increase is pretty exceptional; I have no idea what it means, but I aim to find out. I love data and trends. I really feel, as someone who used to have a hard time finishing what they start, that making goals and tracking progress is one of the main pillars of my success. Right now I have an involved spreadsheet for my financials, a pretty simple one for weight loss, and one halfway in between for writing. I haven’t yet made one for the blog – I am just at the data collecting stage.
As always, I will stick to posts related to all things Kickstarter and Comic Book, though I trust you will forgive me if I get sidetracked into blog related posts once in a great while (especially when I have graphs to share). Anyone else want to share their blog stories? Do we have any serial killers in the house?
Caffeineforge 
Never killed a blog, but it helps that I never threw my hat into the arena to begin with. I didn’t know you had that many false-starts in the past, but glad to see you got back up on that horse. Persistence (and luck) is everything to success.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald