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...
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...
- 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.
- I then generate a blog post about the news item of interest and include maps, diagrams and an explanation if necessary.
- The blog post can take around 2 hours to generate, sometimes longer.
- Links to the blog post then go out on social media so more people can notice it.
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.
