*Before I start, I’ve updated information on Mike Lewis’s swearing in below.*
Today is the first anniversary of monoblogue. One year ago, I made my first post for this website. In that year, I’ve achieved some of my goals for the site while others are still in the process of being worked on.
One goal that I’ve far exceeded is readership. On my previous blog site, my best week readership-wise was 197 readers (according to my Site Meter) but generally I would get between 30 and 50 readers a week. I was hoping for 100-200 a week from monoblogue but here are my best readership weeks for each month since I added the Site Meter to this site in April:
- April – 229
- May – 261
- June – 291
- July – 541
- August – 556
- September – 708
- October – 806
- November – 867
It’s actually leveled off somewhat since the election (back to about 600 readers per week or so) but I’m betting you’ll find this to be the case at many political websites, particularly in my case since monoblogue was a good conduit for finding candidate information. Anyway, as you can tell my goals were blown away early. Now I’m trying for my first four-figure readership week.
Also, the number of links to monoblogue from other sources has risen. For much of that I’m indebted to the fellow members of the Maryland Bloggers Alliance, a family of now 15 fine blogs from around the state that are generally political but also touch on many other topics. In its first year the MBA has grown from the original two members (Pillage Idiot and Soccer Dad) to its current state. My website was the first to be included from outside the Baltimore/DC metro area and still is the sole representative on the Eastern Shore.
Probably the largest goal I have yet to achieve is getting monoblogue to be a profitable enterprise. Fortunately it’s not a really expensive hobby, but I would like to see SOME income from it. There’s methods of achieving that which I’m going to explore further in year number two.
But overall this has been a good year for my website, and I would consider mine to be in the upper echelon of the local blogosphere. Slowly monoblogue is getting a voice in local and state affairs, and I’m planning on keeping that focus in the days to come. There’s a few things I’m working on for future posts and hopefully these will be enlightening and entertaining once they are posted.
There’s just something about December 1st in my life. It’s also the day I began my first architectural job back in Toledo, Ohio 20 years ago. That career path led me to this area where monoblogue started, so I’m looking to see where my monoblogue path leads me. It’s a journey that I’ll hopefully share with my readers for many years to come.
Late update: December is off to a good start! My latest Site Meter report came in and I topped my old record with 881 visitors according to them.
Congratulations Michael!
You do a fantastic job. Keep it up. You probably have a lot more readers than your site meter stats show. There are a lot of us out there that come in via your RSS feed directly to individual posts. Your SiteMeter may only pick us up if we come through your front page. My RSS reader shows the entire post so I only come on the the actual MonoBlogue site some of the time.
Cato, you could be right. The meter on my website server is always WAY higher than my Site Meter…according to that I had just over 100,000 hits in November (first time I’ve had six figures in that department.) I’m sure the majority are bots that pick up what content I have on the site, and a lot of the rest are spam commenters (thank goodness for Akismet, I get maybe 75-100 spam comments a day that I can easily clean out because of it) but if even 5% are legit that’s 5,000 readers in a month.
I like the name, very clever!