©2011 Reflections of a Rational Republican
One of the first goals of any successful blog is to find ways of driving traffic to one’s site. It is all about getting attention. One of the most obvious initial lessons about blogging is that the higher the cumulative number of posts, the more page views one generates.
©2011 Reflections of a Rational Republican
The chart above shows an exponential relationship between daily page views and my site’s cumulative number of posts. Regression analysis suggests that the total posts I cumulatively generate explains about 37% of the data for daily page views.
If one removes outliers of more than 200 page views in a single day, the equation below describes nearly 40% of the data.
©2011 Reflections of a Rational Republican
The bottom line is that not only are one’s page views directly associated with the number of posts one generates, but that there is a predictive relationship between the two numbers that can be described by an exponential curve.
What this means in practice, is that most blogs will start slowly and then begin generating momentum.
This result is intuitive because the more posts that one has on the internet, the more opportunities one has for readers to stumble across one’s site.
Of course, such an exponential increase can not be sustained forever.
My view is that like any product, a blog’s page views follow an S-curve. Readership slowly and steadily increases, then it accelerates until it reaches a critical mass. It then increases slowly again as it approaches a theoretical saturation point.
In the next installment, I will discuss the next lesson: leveraging the media to drive traffic to your site.
Reflections of a Rational Republican 