Back to Single Digits

My recent forays into garnering "item use" clicks through FeedBurner at a triple digit rate each day seems to have come to an end, at least for the time being. I can't complain as I have no idea was to what factors raised my count to a high of 510 item clicks for a single day and have no precise idea why it has dropped again. However, I do have a hypothesis. This weblog provided to a limited audience a number of weblinks which generated some interest. That audience consists not only of direct subscribers and site visitors but others with interest in specific sources of information and relatively little direct interest in this weblog itself. Once a particular item attains its maximum interest limit in that finite market it drops off, perhaps then following a long-tail configuration.

On account of a diversity of interests, this weblog had a variety of different posts that readers found appealing out on the web at the same time. If this weblog's audience increases at sometime in the future and there are pockets of similar interest within that expanded audience, then there may be another swell of "item use clicks". The same could happen if I hit a different vein of interest with some future posts. Until then I am taking heed of some advice found in a recent Brazen Careerist post.

• You never know what people will link to
• Not all traffic is equal, and linkbait doesn’t garner the best traffic.
• Many posts on my blog that did not get as much traffic ended up attracting more people who returned to the blog over and over again.
• The real linkbait is an interesting, useful, well-written posts.

Ms. Trunk also advices:

Turning posts into lists. People like to scan posts and find one thing they like, and then they call it out on their own blog. And it’s a gift to the reader anyway, to parse a post into lists of bullets for an easier read.

At the very least, this weblog tries to highlight items of interest and make them readily available.

Seth Godin on 1/26/08 at his own Seth's Blog advices:

Just say it

Don't let the words get in the way. If you're writing online, forget everything you were tortured by in high school English class. You're not trying to win any awards or get an A. You're just trying to be real, to make a point, to write something worth reading.

So just say it.

Based on the above, there won't be any change in the direction this weblog has taken since its inception. This still serves as an effective learning tool about not only blogging and web 2.0 but a number of other areas of interest, so there won't be any chasing of high hit numbers. If my interests match that of others in the future, and they also get some good out of this so much the better.