As Kevin predicted last night, OTB has passed the 200,000 unique visitor point.* Thanks to all who visit and especially those who link and send traffic.
There are 90-odd blogs whose average daily traffic exceeds mine and a few that get more than 200,000 visits every week. And at least a couple of sites (Electric Venom and Wizbang) that started after I did that have had more visits (Wizbang has had over 100,000 visits this month alone). Still, I never expected the blog to catch on as well as it has. I’ve been in the top 50 of the TTLB Ecosytem for quite a while now, ranking along with and even ahead of some of the blogs that inspired me to finally take the plunge and start doing this thing.
Navel gazing is a fondness many of us engage in and many pixels have been killed trying to explain how to build readership for one’s blog. I’m not sure I have the answers to that. Frankly, there are quite a number of the truly “big” blogs that I find very uninteresting. On the other hand, there are many, many extremely well-written blogs that never seem to catch on for whatever reason.
I had the good fortune, so to speak, of being reasonably knowledgable about military and foreign affairs at a time when those topics are far higher on the radar screen of even the type of informed readers who frequent weblogs than normal. My traffic spiked thanks to several links from very prominent bloggers (notably Scott Ott, Stephen Green, and Glenn Reynolds) after I’d been doing this less than two months, giving me a big kick start. Indeed, it took several months to equal my peak for March.
As many others have written before, writing to chase visitors is extremely elusive and, frankly, hard to sustain. I’m seldom very good at predicting which posts will generate the most interest. I’ve written many short essays that I thought quite provocative and insightful, only to be greeted with nary a comment or TrackBack. Conversely, links to stories that virtually anyone could have found combined with a snarky comment or two sometimes generate a flood of interest. So, writing to please yourself is definitely the way to go. Hopefully, what interests you will eventually interest others.
Blogging is also a communitarian exercise. Aside from a handful of essayists like Steven Den Beste and James Lileks, most successful bloggers interact with other bloggers in some fashion, whether by linking and commenting on one another’s posts, participating in comments section discussions, or both. Virtually all the blogs on my blogroll are those that I found consistently linked from sites I was visiting a lot, who I noticed from the comments section here at OTB, or who I found because they had linked and commented on my posts on their site.
Likewise, take advantage of free publicity opportunities like the various Carnivals, Kate’s Letter of the Day and Snark Hunt, or the Beltway Traffic Jam.
And, as Kevin McGehee noted this morning, posting a lot helps.
Previous Milestones:
1000 – March 4 5000 – March 21 10,000 – March 22 25,000 – March 30 50,000 – May 19 100,000 – August 14
*As measured by SiteMeter since I installed the counter on February 4.
