500 Not Out!

It’s a more than a couple of years now since I started up a blog. Inflicting your thoughts on the world in this manner is a relatively new phenomenon but as everyone else seemed to be doing it, I thought I may as well join in. And I kept going.

So welcome to blog number 500!

In the past 499 blogs I’ve covered many of my favourite subjects: sports and music, politics and mental health issues. And the surprising thing is that people like you regularly read what I have to say.

In total, WordPress’s excellent stats facility tells me that my articles have been read about 119,000 times in total. That’s an average of around 240 reads per article. And it seems that around 140 people will read an article on my blog every day. 5,000 per month us about average at the moment.

Of course the numbers vary daily depending on what I write about. And readership understandably dropped during the three months or so that I was ill and didn’t write anything at all.

In recent times my blogs on the demise of the former Rangers Football Club PLC in administration) have proven to be particularly popular, with several achieving over 1,000 views in a day. I guess bad news really does sell – particularly amongst those who don’t see it as bad news!

My blog has been viewed in 99 different countries to date. Not surprisingly the UK, the USA and Ireland are topping the list, but for some reason I also seem to have regular readers in Iceland, Thailand and India. And I’ve even managed to reach Vietnam and China, which is nice.

As well as those who follow my blog and receive notice of new posts directly (and thanks to you all!), a large number of visitors come from Facebook and Twitter, and many come from other sites that have links in place permanently or who take a particular liking to an individual article.

Celtic sites are high on the list of referrers – Celtic Quick News, Celtic News Now, Kerrydale Street and Celtic Minded among them. But there are political sites there too – Lallands Peat Warrior, Newsnet Scotland and Scottish Round Up have all sent people to my blog.

Thousands also find my writing through search engines. WordPress helpfully lists all of the terms used in these searches, and while many are the obvious footballing and musical ones, there are some strange searches in there too.

Some relate directly to particular blogs I’ve written. How much pocket money to give children seems to be a common search, as do various republican and anti-royalist terms. Some interesting combinations used include “coalition, Thatcherite” and “MPs, convictions”.

I’ve written a fair bit about bipolar disorder and so quite a few folk find my sites by googling celebrities’ names in connection to the condition. Johnny Cash comes up quite often, and I’ve often wondered myself. But the one that surprised me most was “Is John Major bipolar”? Now if you can think of anyone less likely to suffer from extreme mood swings then let me know!

On a sad note, the individual article that has been viewed the most times is one I wrote when I lost a good friend, Steve Reynolds or Pablophanque as many knew him. That’s a tribute to how many people marked his passing and still miss the man.

So, 500 blogs and still going strong. Who would have thought it? I’ll keep writing as long as folk keep reading – I’m never short of something to say! With Scottish football in a turbulent state and a referendum campaign just starting I won’t be short of subjects.

My thanks to everyone who has read my blog. I know the totals are probably small in comparison to those that some other sites get these days, but it’s kind of gratifying to know that my articles have been read almost 120,000 times in total!

 

 

About these ads