A quick blog self analysis

I've been looking back over my blog statistics and made a few confirmations/discoveries of things that I already intuitively knew.  There have been 3 period that I had a lot of visitors to my blog.  The first period was when I was new.  I was writing a lot more essay style posts than at other times.  I have to say, that's what I'd prefer to write - more insightful, researched posts.  I had my greatest readership success at that time.  I'm not sure whether it was because I was new or because of what I was writing, but I was getting noticed.

About 9 months later I went through a visitor resurgence.  At that time my posts were shorter but much more frequent - sometimes I would post 5 times a day.  These posts were more observational with some opinion thrown in.  I got a lot of visitors then too, but not quite as much as the first bit of 'success'.  It was enjoyable to write these too, but less so than the essays.  It felt more connected to current events but like I could offer less insight.  It was also more difficult because blogging is a hobby, not my job, and it was more time consuming than I had the resources to commit to it.

More recently I had another resurgence that lasted only for a few weeks.  My blogging has become both less frequent and less detailed.  That is only because I've been very busy both at home and at work since the summer.  But I still had a mini-surge (no thanks to Harry Reid), as a result of a fluke use of keywords. Apparently I'd stumbled upon a good Search Engine Optimized (SEO) term and I got a lot of hits on one particular post for a couple of weeks on a topical issue (Senator Byrd's replacement).  For a while I was number one on that term. Despite reading about SEO, I have yet to hit on anything consistently, but as a writing style it's pretty irrelevant.  It's more about how to get people to read what you've written than actually writing.

So what's it all mean?  I'd like to go back to writing more detailed posts.  It's not about getting readership, although it's nice to know you aren't writing for just yourself.  I'd like to write more meaningful, longer posts, with at least a daily entry even if there are some shorter ones a few days a week.  And while I'm doing that, I'll have to try to hit on some sort of SEO recipe that works.  Now, if you've read all this and are wondering what the heck this has to do with anything, sorry.  I was just sort of thinking out loud at my keyboard and I am in no way able to give you those 60 seconds of your life back.