I've been avoiding Wordpress' "My Stats" page lately. Life has been keeping me really busy for the past month or two, so I've been updating my blog much less than I'd like. What do you get when you combine few posts with zero marketing or networking? Low page views. Whenever I see those 0 view days my heart sinks a tiny little bit: that's another day I could've spent half an hour writing and updating the blog.
I have no idea what inspired me to take a look at my stats yesterday. Perhaps I was just bored, or my brain was still mushy from the fever I'd been struggling with. Anyway: I opened the stats page.
Can Wordpress have bugs? I asked myself. Because this has to be a bug. Or a bot invasion. Does Wordpress note bots or crawlers? All the other days looked normal, but yesterday's pageviews were at 603 - about 11 times my previous record!
For some hours I was baffled, convinced that there had been some mistake. Eventually the mystery was answered in an e-mail: someone from a sword-themed community website had heard of my blog and shared a link to it on Facebook. In just 1 day, he guided over 100 unique visitors to my site.
I finally made a Facebook account. This, better than anything, proved to me the importance of social networking sites to writers. A bit of luck, of course, helps too
I expect my visitor numbers to shrink down again soon. That's fine. Writing for a very small audience has a lot of advantages. But totally regardless of how this affects future traffic on my blog, I'm super happy right now.
(tl;dr: You should think twice before ignoring the power of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.)
I have no idea what inspired me to take a look at my stats yesterday. Perhaps I was just bored, or my brain was still mushy from the fever I'd been struggling with. Anyway: I opened the stats page.
Can Wordpress have bugs? I asked myself. Because this has to be a bug. Or a bot invasion. Does Wordpress note bots or crawlers? All the other days looked normal, but yesterday's pageviews were at 603 - about 11 times my previous record!
For some hours I was baffled, convinced that there had been some mistake. Eventually the mystery was answered in an e-mail: someone from a sword-themed community website had heard of my blog and shared a link to it on Facebook. In just 1 day, he guided over 100 unique visitors to my site.
I finally made a Facebook account. This, better than anything, proved to me the importance of social networking sites to writers. A bit of luck, of course, helps too
I expect my visitor numbers to shrink down again soon. That's fine. Writing for a very small audience has a lot of advantages. But totally regardless of how this affects future traffic on my blog, I'm super happy right now.
(tl;dr: You should think twice before ignoring the power of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.)
