The first week of February was my best traffic week in a long time.
I had a lot of traffic on my blog the first week of February, nearly 12,000 views, one of my best weeks ever. So I must have been busy posting popular content, right? Not really. I posted three times last week:
- A post about my Tumblr blog Buttrynyms drew a whopping 53 views that week.
- A post on journalists’ reactions to Project Unbolt drew 195 views that week.
- A Saturday post about a gift from my father got just 69 views that week.
That’s it. Fresh content accounted for fewer than 400 views that week. My fresh content did better the week before and the week after. In fact, my content from the previous week did better that week than the fresh content did.
Yet I had the busiest week I can remember (weekly traffic stats only go back to July in my WordPress dashboard and I’ve paid closer attention to monthly and daily traffic).
The point here is not to boast about that week’s traffic (or to expose the weak traffic for the fresh posts), but to emphasize the importance of understanding metrics, not just following them blindly. (more…)
