Until recently HaveMacWillBlog made sense as a web site into which I could pour just about anything I chose to write about. In April of this year I wrote the posting 10 Words You Don’t Know. I didn’t particularly think it would generate traffic, but it did. It generated traffic in a big way.
What is Big?
Neophite bloggers don’t really know what constitutes good traffic. Well good traffic varies. If you write for CNET or The Register, then a well written piece will pull in thousands of readers, but that’s the power of a high Google ranking.With a lowly blog, unless someone links to you from a popular site, most blog postings – even those that merit attention, will rarely get more than a few hundred reads – and it will even take a long time to rack that number up.
However a good posting, with an attractive title, like Sex and the Naked Vampire will pull in thousands, because that’s how the world works. (That particular posting is up around the 7000 mark).
When I began blogging properly in 2007, rather than posting things here and there, I averaged about a hundred to two hundred readers per day. The numbers began to rise in time as more sites linked to me. Here’s a graph of the traffic:
Most of the rise in traffic since April can be attributed to the Words You Dont Know postings. There have been traffic storms with, on the odd day or two, thousands of visitors. It began with a link from Stumble Upon, and continued with a MetaFilter link, and a link from a Belgian site, and from various blogs – all of which generated unusually high traffic. Those postings now account for half the traffic on this blog.
Anyway, the Have Mac Will Blog web site doesn’t make much sense any more because it has two distinct traffic lanes; the wordies and the techies, and there’s not a great deal of overlap. It’s become too much of a grab bag. So it has undergone mitosis. It has split like an amoeba into two distinct sites, one of which is now called: Words You Don’t Know.
