On March 19 of last year the counter on the front page of this blog had a little over 28,000 hits. At the time of this posting the hit counter shows we are up over 6000 hits to to 62,585. That is probably not a highly accurate indicator of how many people come to the blog. It counts only hits on the main link to the blog. It counts every time the page is accessed making no distinction between hits by multiple users. Now, we have a statistics application that runs on the blog to capture blog activity a little more precisely. The bottom line is that we are getting very close to 1000 unique visitors and 7000 page views per month. Even though we have been keeping the blog for around five years, we really did not start tracking hits until a couple of years ago. We did not add the statistics package to do more precise tracking until six or seven months ago.
One of the most interesting things we found from the statistics is that new readers come to the blog because we are fairly high on the Google result list for searches on information about Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad, Sonlight Homeschool curricula, Singapore Math, Teaching Textbooks math, Amigurumi, homeschool socialization, and several other topics. We do not know how many first time visitors stick around to read more of the blog nor how many return to the site to read more later. We do know that some come back because they have commented here. We love it that we have established a little bit of community and that people feel comfortable enough to comment.
The blog started out as a record of our kids homeschool journey. The thing we like about the blog is that it has evolved into a narrative that is interesting to write, not so much because the things in it are so exceptional, but because the things in it are so, well, regular or normal. When we write about homeschool, crafts, or technology projects, they are part of the narrative flow. We really try not to characterize our thoughts as the last word on a subject, they are just our thoughts. This is the stuff that interests us and we are glad it is of interest to some other people, too.
If you are a lurker, we are very happy you are here. If you would be willing to leave a short comment letting us know you are here, we would grateful for that, too. Thanks to everyone out there for making this blog fun.
Kendall
I lurk thanks to my subscribed RSS feed. 🙂
Very cool Kendall! I am glad you brought up that RSS feed thing. One of the other big things we have seen in the blog statistics is that we average roughly half as many RSS feed hits per day as unique visitors. I just put a link to our RSS feed down at the bottom of the left column when I redesigned the website a few months back. I think that has helped us a ton!
Hi Ken,
Have Christian check his blog. Something weird comes up due to my avast anti-virus. Not sure about it.
Ruthie
Will do Ruthie. Thanks for the tip. We are in the process of switching it over to our own web host, so that might be the thing that pushes over the edge!
You’re in my RSS reader too [smile].
Congratulations on the upswing in visitors. That is exciting. Keep up the great work!
~Luke
Thanks Luke. We appreciate you coming by. I will be writing some about the whole combination of Sonlight (Thinkwell, Teaching Textbooks, etc.) materials in conjunction with REA and other materials combination that we have used to prepare us for CLEP over the next few months. Any feedback on stuff I get wrong will be greatly appreciated.
Aren’t stats fun? I enjoy looking at mine and sometimes I get a good laugh over some off-the-wall Google search that sent someone to my site. Otherwise, it’s a great tool for making a site better and better.
Lynn
Nice work Ken! Probably what keeps me coming back is I know you will always have interesting content. If you don’t, Kelly and Christian certainly do!
You should check out Woopra.com, very interesting stat utility.
~Bryan
Thanks Bryan! We are awfully glad you come by to visit. I will definitely check out Woopra. Right now we use StatPress.