Spike, Downtime and Growth
Today I was looking at my FeedBurner stats, and I’ve noticed some nice, steady growth over the past little while. The past two days my subscriber count was 42/40 (today it’s 35, but I didn’t post yesterday) and a short while ago it was 20, and before that 10, etc…
What does it take to bring growth to a blog? I can’t answer that, as it depends for everyone, but here’s my all time FeedBurner stats graph:
As you can see, for the first three months or so I signed up for FeedBurner, but didn’t really have a voice or anything to say, so that one subscriber in October/November was probably me. The real stats start in January ‘07 where I regrouped and went back to WordPress and started burning my feed again.
Shortly after you can see the big spike that came at the end of January and beginning of February. This was a combination of releasing a free WP theme, and writing this article which got featured on MacSurfer. It reached up to 112, and was actually around 50 for a couple of days.
Same person, same posts, but I couldn’t hold the count, and somehow over 90 people ‘unsubscribed’ and I was back to where I was before, but a little farther ahead.
So then comes the part in between the spike and downtime, which I like to cal ‘attempted growth’ which was full of digg-bait and writing for the sake of having more people read. I managed to pop over 20 for a while, but soon later I screwed up my .htaccess file, which led to this 3 day down time.
As you can see it’s been all uphill from there. I forgot about the amount of traffic and just kept writing and I’ve seen nice growth ever since. That downtime, which put me at 0 for a day was March 6th, and only two months or so down the line I could be at 46 (est. for May 6th ;)).
So this is what has worked for me, a weird unconventional way of growing. Spiking and plummeting aren’t ways to improve (unless you can use the spike) but I’ve used that as experience, to grow my writing style, to then grow my numbers. How’s your growth been?
Update: Image fixed… It was probably telling you to refresh, because I got lazy and made it a dynamic image right from FeedBurner. Now it’s static and viewable by all!
Leave a comment
jez
April 28th, 2007 at 4:15 PM
don’t worry about those spikes. my feed readers keep dropping from 200 to 120, then up to 160 again, suddenly 300, then 120 the next week.
Maybe those feed readers are moody or the display routine is changed. No idea.
more readers does not essentially equal more website growth, does it?
You know what I miss on this commenting area?
the cool checkbox which asks you if you want to receive an email with a follow-up comment.
enjoy your remaining weekend, jez
Connor Wilson
April 28th, 2007 at 6:41 PM
In my case the feed numbers definitely show growth, in yours I don’t know. Posting everyday is a key to keeping the feeds consistent, or maybe you have a lot of readers that have clients that only ping a couple of days at a time.
And I should add a link to the comments feed for the specific post, eh?
jez
April 29th, 2007 at 6:55 AM
naw, I dont mean the comments feed, but the “notifiy me if there is a new comment” plugin thing. I think I run it on my site as well, if you are curious, just clicky on a single post and see the comments section.
besides, you are probably right with the pinging clients
Connor Wilson
April 29th, 2007 at 10:35 AM
Got it
For anyone else, here’s the link: http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2004/06/03/wp-subscribe-to-comments/
jez
April 30th, 2007 at 8:05 PM
awesome, thanks
I am too lazy to subscribe to the feed, so I really enjoy this “subscribe to comment” thing.
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