In mid-April, I was talking with Sheila Hagar about my theory that people who partake of the blog buffet want choices and new selections as much as possible. People don’t go to Granny’s Buffet for quality, they go for quantity.
I think blog readers are looking for the same thing. They want interesting content, but it can’t stay stale very long.
My way, I told her to prove this, was to blog every day in May and prove that just the volume alone would increase my traffic. She said she wanted in, and I challenged her to a battle I knew I couldn’t win. But sometimes when you lose, you actually win. That is how I felt this situation would unravel.
Sheila immediately made me the bad guy, the young punk, and people ate it up. I enjoyed it quite a bit as well.
My hunches were right, challenging Sheila put me on the map, as I am new to the UB and relatively unknown. I’m not one who enjoys anonymity. Also, blogging every day did increase traffic, for me it was a 2000% increase and helped me launch a column in the paper.
I did learn that you should never change the name of your blog, EVER. Especially, if you are in the middle of a blog war. That kind of hurt my traffic a bit.
In the end Sheila won, she beat me pretty handily, but actually not as handily as I thought she would. Her visits were 25% higher than mine and her page views 15% higher.
In the end, the war went to the grizzled veteran, the woman who talks from the heart and lives among the people. It was fun, and I want to thank Sheila for humoring me with a chance to lose to such a great writer. Where oh where should we go to lunch? It’s your call Sheila.
4 Comments
That is a crock Jeramey! How about some actual numbers- not vague percents.
What are you afraid of?
Who cares about the numbers? Seriously, the jump in percentage is huge, why are you have such a hard on to need to know the actual numbers!
Re: Who caresRaw numbers mean everything. What can you tell with percents? Nothing, unless you have real numbers to apply them do. For example, a 2,000% increase from 1 viewer is 21 viewers; 2,000% from 248 viewers would be 4,961.
In fact, this blog post has 200% more comments than the previous one; sounds big, doesn’t it?
A percentage statistic about anything is completely useless without knowing the sample size.
Being the readers who helped bring in the views, I don’t think it’s too much for us to ask how many others there are. It’s what the readers want!
Oops! Formatting accident.
By the way, Jeremy, are you just getting even with us for not hitting the ten comment mark?
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