Everybody get ready to blow out some candles! My blog is two years old. I read somewhere that only about 5% of blogs remain active as long as two years, so I think this week calls for a celebration! Thanks to all of you for reading and encouraging me! You are all awesome.
When I first started the blog, I asked some friends to help me publicize my efforts and build readership. I explained that I read that a “successful” blog unassociated with some particular company or service has about 1,000 unique visitors per month, but that I could not imagine recruiting that many people to read my blog on a regular basis. One of my friends, who used to be my boss and knows too well how obsessive I can be about metrics, asked me what I would do if I did not attract those 1,000 blog readers. I don’t know if he was worried that I would take random people hostage and force them to read the blog at gunpoint or that I would simply take a long walk on a short pier. Having gained some perspective in retirement about my need to succeed, I assured him that I intended to blog whether anyone read it or not. I told him that Terri LaBonte would keep talking to the blogosphere until she had nothing left to say. After two years, I am still talking.
To my constant amazement, delight, and befuddlement, the blog has been attracting over 1,000 unique visitors per month on a pretty regular basis. So I guess I am not just talking to myself. Many of you comment, either on the website or by sending me an email. Your insights are so beautiful and valuable. We have rich, respectful, and real discussions. I think I am a better person (certainly, a healthier and less neurotic one) because I write the blog and because I read your perspectives.
I hope that we can continue on our journey together for a long time to come. I hope I still have stuff to say and am not just rerunning old ideas. Not that old ideas are always bad. Didn’t someone say that there is nothing new under the sun? All that will ever really be new is our way of looking at the world. Thank you all for helping me to see the world in a new way.
So have a piece of virtual birthday cake. Blow out some virtual candles. Make a real wish. Then make that wish come true!
What are your birthday wishes for our blogday? What topics would you like to discuss? Please share your perspective by leaving a comment. In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com. By the way, if you’d like another helping of Terri, I did another guest blog post at retirementandgoodliving.com. You can visit at http://retirementandgoodliving.com/lessons-i-wish-i-never-had-to-learn/
I hope all your wishes come true today!
Terri 🙂
Hi,
I’m intrigued by the measures you’ve put in here about visitors per month… Now I’ve got to go see what I can tell on my own blog! And you are right that many bloggers don’t last. I’ve had a number of folks I started to follow just vanish. I tell friends who want to start blogging that you need to think about what your blog is about and be sure it’s something you have passion for talking about, for a long time. And you are right – even if it’s not new, you bring a new point of view. I often find my topics based on reading other blogs and having a different POV!
I just learned about blog link-ups. Bloggers host them to drive traffic to there own blogs but if you link up, you also get some new readers. I’m going to try one or 2 out this next couple of month. I’ve also found a couple of new bloggers to follow as I looked at them…now I need to figure out how to link myself in! If you’re looking to continue to increase your readership, you might look there.
Thanks, Pat. I may look into that link-up thing. What I don’t know or understand about the technological side of things could fill another whole book! I am passionate about blogging and I am glad of what I’ve learned, but the very idea of taking another step into cyber-technology always makes my stomach turn! My webhosting site, Go Daddy, has a pretty good section that spells out metrics, so I didn’t have to understand much once I found where that was. As far as the 1,000 unique visitors each month, it is just something that I seemed to find repeated on the internet when people were trying to answer the question about “how many readers is good?” Most people did not answer the question directly, so I don’t really know if there is truly a number. I have been shopping my book to agents for a few months now (unsuccessfully) and I don’t believe that they find my numbers particularly thrilling. One agent referred to them as being “not quite large enough” to mitigate a publisher’s risk. I don’t know if that was “nice” code for “your number of unique visitors is pathetic” or if it really meant that I was in the ballpark but not quite hitting a home run.