This week we had our 600,000th visitor to A Pilgrim In Narnia! Was it you? I honestly have no way of knowing, and I’m a little afraid of the global attention you’d receive if I could publish that news. Fame can be a crushing thing, you know. Nonetheless, I do appreciate your engagement as readers, commenters, sharers, writing partners, and guest bloggers over the past 7 years.
Coincidentally, this is actually my 800th post!- Wow. Some rough math suggests that my blog is now longer than The Lord of the Rings (though with fewer orcs).
- The Inklings & Arthur series this spring, featuring Sørina Higgins’ edited volume, was the most popular series ever, though over time posts on The Screwtape Letters and the 70th-anniversary Great Divorce series in 2014-15 have gathered more hits.
- My first month of posting, August 2011, resulted in a whopping 190 hits. Now A Pilgrim in Narnia gets 12,000-17,000 hits per month, depending on the time of year (summer is always quieter, winter fall-winter always the most active).
- Though Twitter and Facebook drive reader engagement, almost half of my traffic comes from Google. See my “Fun With Stats” series (here and here) for more comments along that line. If you are thinking of getting into blogging, make sure to read my post, “The 5 Most Common Mistakes Bloggers Make.”
- I just passed 1GB of data on the blog; I don’t know what that means, but it seems like a cool statistic.
- The top site that jumps from mine (other than Youtube) is Arend Smilde’s resource site, www.lewisiana.nl; other popular sites include the LOTR Project, Joel Heck’s site, and Inklings Bloggers.
- My very first post took me 2 months to have the courage to write. I registered A Pilgrim in Narnia 7 years ago last week and finally wrote my first post in August, 2011. The first post was a short one on Lewis’ letter-writing, coming out of reading Letters to an American Lady at the beach. More recently, since I kind of liked it, I rewrote that piece (see here). I remain fascinated by Lewis’ letters, going so far as to count them once.
- I’m embarrassed to say my most popular post is still “50 Shades of Bad Writing,” but the other most popular posts are Lewis, Tolkien, and Fantasy-related blogs.
- I have written about Pink, baking powder biscuits, Gandalf in central park, Nicole Kidman, Neil Gaiman being a (good kind of) jerk, Leprechauns, and C.S. Lewis’ unknown and possibly unreal stepson, C.S. Lewis Jr; yet I have never written on Owen Barfield.
This has been and continues to be fun, as I explain in my clickbaitishly titled, “The Shocking, Horrifying, You-Can’t-Believe-It! Reason This Blogger Isn’t Taking A Break.” I will be posting weekly throughout the summer, concluding the L.M. Montgomery series and recording some research and reading notes. This fall I have a cool and potentially controversial series in the Narnia world and some travel news.
Happy 600,000th! (note: 600,000 miles is nearly 1,000,000 kms, so 600,000 hits in the US would be like a million readers in Canada, right?)
Congrats! and those current monthly numbers, those are awesome! Glad to hear you’re not taking a break.
On that note, since you’ve been at one place for 7 years now, how do you deal with burnout/blog fatigue anyway? Or is this more like a job than anything so it gets done, period?
And I love your conversion theory. Sounds good to me 🙂
Good question. Honestly, I … I do what I want. If I want to take a break, I do. If want to sketch a quick note, I do. If I want to do a big essay or experimental poetry or make fun of something, I do. So I feel pretty free.
Beyond that, the best thing I do is have a handful of blog posts that are a half hour or an hour to completion. That allows me to do what I want, not worried about what’s waiting for me. When I commit to blog series, that’s harder. So I sketch out the whole series before I promise. Over time, I collect ideas. I have a “running blog ideas” folder with 30 or 40 concepts I could work out.
I also do some guest publishing when I know I will be low (this winter was terribly busy and we had an amazing series). And if it is a light week, I reblog something to encourage another good blogger and to introduce readers to new ideas.
What burns me out, honestly, is that I know there are 30 or 40 good bloggers I’d like to visit this week to encourage and learn from, and I won’t get there.
Does that help?
That is fantastic that you have such a detailed plan. I’m guessing it comes from experience 🙂
It does help. I’m very much a mood writer and trying to write posts ahead of time is tough. Got any advice for that?
I have some plans but I also have a “pool”–a place to get water from when I need it.
My advice: do one of two things:
1. Post when you want and google analytics be damned (well, maybe not damned, but exiled in some way). Do what you want and worry about readership later. You can always rewrite and repost later. Meanwhile, find one facebook group you connect with well and post your occasional thoughts there too. I would recommend getting it out but letting it sit a few days. You may find regularity develop (monthly or weekly).
2. Write as if you are blogging, but bank the writing. Then, when you have 5 or 12 posts, set up the blog and put in a modest schedule (monthly or weekly).
Does that make sense?
b
Thank you. At some point I would like to make the move to a dot com or dot blog but right now, I’m so strictly amateur hour that I don’t want to invest time AND money.
Me and facebook aren’t friends, nor me and groups in general. Even on booksites I never last longer than 3 or 4 months in a group. So I might try your second option and see how that works. It aligns pretty close to how I read already, so it wouldn’t be much of a stretch.
And thank you again for taking the time to give advice like this. I really appreciate it 🙂
Ok. Now we need a post on Owen Barfield. And more orcs!
“Owen and the Orcs,” I can see it now.
LOL. And what they said above…. love your conversion theory…post on Owen Barfield…More orcs…
Hurrah! It’s all mind-boggling… (“now longer than The Lord of the Rings”!).
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner – I’ve never got round to reading the story or seeing the movie, and, checking the Iron Maiden song just now to see if it was familiar without my realizing it – it wasn’t (but I enjoyed it) – happily, you do not seem to be suffering that! To quote about the only appropriate lines from the song:
Keep the pace, hold the race
Your mind is getting clearer.
“Your mind is getting clearer”–this is what I’m counting on!
Seeing “other popular sites include…” gets me thinking to encourage your other readers (and you) to toddle over to the Wade blog, “Off the Shelf”, and add suggestions to their welcome and handy list in the latest post!
Yes, precisely. There (mostly) monthly blog is high quality.
Congrats and cool stats! Looking forward to the summer and fall series. Also, yes, clearly you have 1million Canadian readers XD