I admit, when I'm bored I'll check me referrals. I've gone weeks without doing it once, and I've had times where I check twice a day. What I'm really interested in is which search terms lead people to my blog. It's always interesting, sometimes surprising. I also like to look at my referrals to see who's reading me, so I can check them out. I've found some great blogs that way.

In spite of my own bloggerly failings, I quite agree with all your advice. Sorry I haven't been around lately -- you know how intrusive Real Life can be.

At the risk of sounding like a complete fossil... rock on! (hee!)

I notice your sitemeter is closed. You don't check your referrals often, but nobody else can check them at all. Thousands of visitors a day? If you say so. Heh.

I notice your sitemeter is closed. You don't check your referrals often, but nobody else can check them at all. Thousands of visitors a day? If you say so. Heh.

Phew. Good thing I don't have to answer to you. Then I'd really be in trouble, eh?

I think you missed the whole point. What was discussed in this post is exactly why I keep it closed. I don't sell ads and therefore it's irrelevant to the content of my site. If it's irrelevant to me, it should be irrelevant to you. But you're probably a tourist. In which case, see my last point of the post.

Ambra,

I like to know what someone says about my site or my post and thank them personally or comment on their insightful post.

I like it when someone does the same to my site, even if it is a "hey thanks for the link". It show that they are paying attention.

Sometimes someone will link to my site and not use trackback, therefore I wouldn't know that they are linking without my referrer log.

But based on your tease about your next post, are you going to answer my question there?

Good post. I really like your blogging tips. Keep it up.

Okay maybe there wasn't a question in my last post, but you get my drift. :)

I think it's great that you have a lot of readers. I like blogging, and I wouldn't mind having more readers, but that's difficult because it's a narrow theme. But I'm not going to change because I love it. So I guess I'm "stuck."

Complaining about how you wish more people would visit your website is the antithesis of cool.

But one of my taglines is, "Singlehandedly making blogging uncool since May 2002" -- so, I can get away with complaining, right?

Right...?

Aw, nuts.

Oops.

Sorry. I could've sworn I closed that tag.

(sigh)

I'll just go away now.

No worries McGehee...I have some defective HTML. Bold doesn't work for anybody.

Your tagline is hilarious by the way.

Joan wrote: I admit, when I'm bored I'll check me referrals. I've gone weeks without doing it once, and I've had times where I check twice a day. What I'm really interested in is which search terms lead people to my blog.

I'm there with you. I find humor from google searches. The funniest were "cat dreadlocks" and "How to spank my child with a slipper."

Mustnag: I'll work on that answer..when I figure out the question...:-) It's like Blog Jeopardy!

Your piece compels me to make a confession: I love cyber approval. I "love" going to SiteMeter ten-million times a day and then getting frustrated when the hit count doesn't spike upward as it does on days when people like Reynolds, Hewitt, or Althouse link to my site.

But you're right, my focus should just be on producing an interesting, readable blog. Period.

A few years ago, my family and I attended an outdoor concert featuring The Waiting, a great but unfortunately overlooked band. The concert took place in a small southern Ohio town, some two hours from our house, and there was a lot of rain most of the evening. By the time The Waiting hit the stage, there were about fifty of us still in attendance.

They put on a tremendous show!

Later, I emailed them to say how impressed I was by their performance in a concert being seen by so few.

"We decided a long time ago," one of the band members wrote back to me, "that no matter how many people came to see us, we would do our very best."

That seems to crystallize your good advice.

Thanks for your post.

Mark: you've hit the nail on the head. Thanks for that story. I love that philosophy in life.

Hi,

Just came by way of Instapundit. Well written. I blogged for a year and stopped on my anniversary. One day I may start again. I've been giving a lot of thought to what my overall theme/topic area would be and so appreciate and agree with your remark about specializing.

Thank you.

Bitter controversy about traffic and referrals! The Mudville Gazette gave essentially the opposite advice recently.

To each their own, but... I like to know who is sending hits my way, and the traffic meter is one more way to monitor that.

Great post though.

I think that you are wrong about comments to a degree. I think that only looking at large volume web sites leads to a misleading conclusion. There are queueing theory reasons for this, in fact it is probably possible to quantify this effect. I am far less likely to comment on a thread with hundreds of other comments, just as a caller is discouraged from dialing a number that is always busy. Why should I post a comment that will be buried within minutes in a crowd of noise, rewarding the obsessive compulsive posters, regardless of strength of argument.

Of course, when one's audience is family, friends and colleagues, it's a lot harder to delete their comments.

But isn't there something just a LITTLE odd about a post preaching the virtue of being true to one's nearly solitary writing, evoking the image of the lonely artist in his garret, warming his hands at the heat-sink of his computer, when the post is then linked by Michelle Malkin and, several days later, by Glenn-boy his own self?

As my mother-in-law used to say, "Rich or poor, it's nice to have money."

I can't believe I missed a chance to use my favorite Yogi Berra quote, "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

GF's post brings up another point, isn't this sort of like explaining how "size doesn't matter?" Maybe it doesn't, but some guys get a lot more action than others.

But isn't there something just a LITTLE odd about a post preaching the virtue of being true to one's nearly solitary writing, evoking the image of the lonely artist in his garret, warming his hands at the heat-sink of his computer, when the post is then linked by Michelle Malkin and, several days later, by Glenn-boy his own self?

Nope. It's ironic but it's not odd. After all, this post is about how to be a successful blogger in unconventional ways....If this post got linked by Malkin and Instapundit, it certainly wasn't because I sent them an email asking them to do so...I just wrote what I felt.

You'll notice also that I don't announce everytime Instapundit links to my blog....that's nerdy too.

Thanks for the very insightful post. All of your tips were very good -- things I have been thinking about but put much more clearly! And at my stage of blogging kind advice is always very welcome.
:-) Thanks again!

I think it also helps when bloggers get articles out there or have media appearances.

Nice articles and some very useful thoughts on blogging.

It's interesting to read the blogs of those who don't advertise and who blog because *they* want to rather than because they're trying to turn a few dollars on the deal. I find they're often more compelling. Not always, but often.

I've been blogging for about six months now, low numerical output, but hopefully thoughtful entries. I don't have a counter of any sort, I don't have advertisments, I don't belong to any alliances or blog-groups or any such thing. This is something I do for me. I have co-workers and friends that read it. They're my majority audience. Oh, and my pastor reads it! :-) I don't want to be a pundit of any sort, that must take far too much time. I'm too eclectic in my interests to maintain a focused blog, so I just enjoy writing about a range of things that interest me. And so far it's still fun.

I just got into blogging and I absolutely love it, so thanks, I keep track of this blog as well as 5 others so far.