To the left is the analytics from December 31st, 2008 to today, December 31st, 2009.
When I look at these numbers I’m honestly a bit disappointed, for a number of reasons.
The first and biggest is that I had as one of my goals for 2009 the goal of breaking one million pageviews. As you can see, I didn’t even get half.
I severely underestimated the growth pattern that I had hoped to accomplish and I have already begun and calculated the reasons why.
The most significant “issue,” if you want to call it that, has been the difficulty of sustained content generation. When I had done my market research and taken a look at other blogs within this field, most of which were secular, I extrapolated my estimate to what I thought was reasonable. The biggest part of the calculation was simply the number of posts per day that could be generated. The mark was 5, and honestly, that was a bit hard to sustain, especially when I’m the primary author and content generator.
My hope was that I’d be able to gather more guest posters in an increasing fashion over the calendar year and establish a robust rotation. I was unable to accomplish this goal as well, and as a result I couldn’t personally continue to pump out 5+ posts a day.
What I did, though, was become more strategic with my publishing and looked at my key metrics for posting times and other factors. It helped a good deal but there was really no opportunity for recovery.
Humbling, to say the least.
I’ve adjusted my goals for 2010, but in a little bit of a different fashion, and we’ll see how this year rolls out.
How has the year looked for you in terms of traffic visits, pageviews, etc? I find it interesting that even though I want to be a champion for openness and transparency, I still get this little pit in my stomach when I start sharing numbers. Maybe it’s my pride or something.
Your turn.