I am 21% of awesome. But the rest, well, as with last year, I thought I'd let everyone know what you hated. My two worst columns from last year, the only ones to get under 400 visitors, were:
1) AGU Meetup? (San Fran, Dec 13-17), at 154 visits.
2) Dating Advice or disaster in the making?, an anemic 257 visits.
Yeah, I can see it. Neither calls to me. The first is just reaching to regular readers who might be in San Francisco, the second is a reblog of someone else's bad dating advice.
Most notably, both were blog posts rather than articles. Blogs here always get less traffic. It is fairly obvious, really-- blogs lurk briefly on the sidebar then disappear, while articles are free to fight for prime coverage on the front page. In fact, the best way to intentionally get a poorly performing column is rely on blogging.
Looking at all of my 160 columns to date, I had 76 'blog' posts and 84 'articles'. Only 15 'blog' posts rose above 1,000 visitors, while only 15 'articles' went below 1,000 (funny how that worked out!)
Why am I 21% of awesome, then? Of all the pieces, 21% (34 of them) reached what I consider the 'worth doing' mark of 2000 or more visitors. I am very happy with those that hit bigger numbers, the 6-10K range. My joyous outlier is the 30,000+ visits to "The Star Trek Computer is Stupid".
Using the awesome online histogram tool from wessa.net ("Free statistics and forecasting software"), and ignoring my big 30K histogram-destroying outlier, here is my total traffic.
Success? Failure? The numbers do not tell the full story-- web traffic is also about demographics-- who you reach, who you connect with. Further, looking at which specific articles pegged the charts gives me good insights into making better stories.
For now, I'm happy being 21% awesome because I am learning the secrets behind crafting awesome sauce. Those secrets? That will be a topic for a future column.
... as long as you keep visiting.
Alex
Tuesdays at The Satellite Diaries and Friday at The Daytime Astronomer (twitter @skyday)
