Blog stats for 2023...

Before we get too far into 2024, I had a quick look back at the traffic to the blog in 2023. As can be seen from the chart above, the average number of pageviews in 2023 was about 20,000 per month. 

I should note that pageviews doesn't mean the actual number of people. If you were to visit the site every day then you'd generate 365 pageviews for the year. I'd guess very few people visit every day and 20,000 is still a significant amount of traffic for a blog about amateur radio and radio technology in general.

The volume of traffic during the year fluctuated quite a lot during the year and that is reflected in the number of times I posted...

2023 (110)
December (14)
November (12)
October (5)
September (1)
June (1)
May (3)
April (3)
March (15)
February (23)
January (33)

I put up posts nearly every day back in January and February, once every two days in March and then I hardly posted anything for months. This had an obvious impact on the level of traffic to the blog.

When I post every few days, the blog gets about 600-800 pageviews per day. If I don't post anything then the daily traffic drops to about 200-300 pageviews per day.

The thing is that the blog is just a hobby for me. It's not a job and if the site gets a lot of hits then great but it's not my reason for posting. I generally blog about things I find of interest regardless of how popular it might be to others.

Each post could take about two hours to prepare and sometimes longer. If I don't find the subject of interest then I don't bother.

How it works... The process for generating a blog post works like this...

1. I see something that is of interest to me. I can see that the news item isn't reaching a large audience / should get more publicity / wasn't fully explained.
2. I then generate a blog post about the news item of interest and include maps, diagrams and an explanation if necessary.
3. The blog post can take around 2 hours to generate, sometimes longer.
4. Links to the blog post then go out on social media so more people can notice it.

Missing posts... As for the lack of posts from April to October...

I get distracted! 😂 I'm off doing other things with my time.

Staying in the loop of the usual news sources takes time and it can take a while to even get back into the routine again.

Traffic Sources... I guess it would be natural to assume that most of the traffic to the site comes from Ireland but that's not the case. These are the largest countries by traffic by country during the year...

United States 63.1K

United Kingdom 13.9K

Germany 13K

Netherlands 10.6K

Ireland 8.37K

Italy 6.36K

France 4.75K

Canada 2.37K

The chart above shows the number of posts per year on the blog. 2022 and 2023 were pretty modest with about 110 posts each for the year. Still though, the traffic for 2023 seems pretty healthy compared to previous years despite the lower number of posts.

Social Media... As for the social media channels...

The EI7GL Facebook page now has 551 followers.

The Twitter / X account has 1429 followers.

The Instagram account has 310 followers.

In conclusion... It would be easy to make a New Year's resolution and say I'll post more this year but I know it will be harder once the evenings get longer. I have a few plans for the blog which I'll cover in a separate post which might change things a bit. I know whatever I do, I'll have to find it interesting to keep my focus.