It’s especially appropriate that I am writing this post today, given that yesterday I got more page views in a single day than I ever have before. That makes me really happy.  This blog has been one of this year’s biggest successes.

You know, ever since high school I’ve wanted to be a blogger. I like to opine. I have tons of thoughts. And I have a fairly charming confessional style. But sometimes it has felt like my efforts were doomed. The heyday of blogging is, admittedly, over. And even if it wasn’t, I really have no idea how to find an audience.

However, if you look at the following graph, you can see that I must be doing something right:

What you’re looking at is a roughly 3x increase increase in monthly pageviews between this year and the equivalent month in 2011. The absolute numbers are still very low (I doubt that I have more than 100-200 actual readers, even if I include people on RSS feeds [who wouldn’t necessarily be counted in these statistics]). But there is a hugely upwards trend!

As you can see, this blog has been on WordPress for four years. And, in each of those years, traffic has at least doubled. No longer do I make jokes about how the only people who read this blog are my friends. That’s just not true anymore (though I am surprised, and gratified, by how many of my real life friends do read it).

The biggest reason why traffic has spiked recently is that I have been posting much more frequently. Early this year, I got tired of losing readers due to non-activity, so I decided to commit myself to writing three posts every week. And, to a large extent, I’ve been able to meet that goal.

But, by itself, increased posting volume would only account for about half of the roughly 250% increase in traffic this year. The rest of it is either due to new readers or more dedicated readers (ones who read more pages per visit). And I feel like it’s probably the former. God knows where you come from, but I am very happy to have you. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m trying to consciously grow the readership of this blog. That’s one reason I’ve become so much more active on Twitter and Facebook lately. I’ve also been commenting much more often on other blogs. However, if I’m been doing this right (and I kind of feel like I am) you probably haven’t noticed this. And if you have, then you haven’t interpreted it as self-promotion activity. (And I don’t think my social networking activity is really that self-promotional. It’s mostly just an extension of what I’ve been trying to do with this blog, which is have fun and form connections with people.)

Anyway, I don’t know whether my traffic will continue to grow exponentially, but…err…I really hope it does?

(Yes, I do realize that these statistics are woefully inadequate. Up until recently, WordPress only measured pageviews, not unique visitors. Now that I have Google Analytics, I should start getting much better data).

I dunno. Let me ask you. How did you find this site?