One hundred fifty-six million blogs

My friends don’t understand when I confide that I have to write a blog. It’s not like you’re getting paid, they say, and they’re right, but this blog is my baby.

Wikipedia, estimates there were one hundred fifty-six million personal blogs in the sphere, though the numbers are difficult to determine, and differ on other websites. The figures boggle the mind. Jack says there must be an awful lot of people out there with nothing to do. Not that reading a blog is doing nothing. Anyway, according the Hat Trick Associates website, there are five to six hundred million readers out there! English readers.

Webdesigner depot claims that the most a personal blog can hope for, in terms of visitors a month, is a thousand. That’s a pretty small chunk of the reading population. The rest visit blogs on a particular topic, like cooking or parenting, or corporate blogs.

I published my first blog at the end of June, in 2010— not quite two years ago. I’m impaired technologically, and learning has been more of a rock-climb than a curve, but hey, all of the mental gymnastics have probably added years to my cognitive life.

On my Bluehost site, I discovered web analytics, logs that show me  statistics about my blog, a few of which I actually understand. For a while, I got very excited about the number of hits my blog was getting, (46,735 in December) but when I discovered that a hit didn’t mean what I’d thought, I got depressed.

I searched Google for hits vs unique visitors, but my eyes glazed over when I tried to digest the results. I still don’t understand analytics, but one figure that doesn’t deceive is the number of people who subscribe to the blog, followers, users, folks who get each new one in their email.

The first time I inadvertently discovered the list of users on my website, the number was miniscule. I gained new followers at a discouraging rate, but I was too busy trying to think up blog topics to fret.

A few weeks ago, the numbers started rising fast. As of this morning, I’ve passed seven hundred!  I’m ecstatic.  I feel like the Sally Fields of blogging. But I wonder who my followers are.

I receive an email each time someone signs up, containing a user name and an email address. Neither the name nor the address reveals anything about the identity of the subscriber. By the way, there are some very clever user names out there. I can only imagine who they belong to.

My followers are a silent bunch. I wonder why, and what I’d have to do to inspire them to comment…  Should I send each new subscriber a message, and plead a little? Download a widget or a plugin to install one of those little boxes with icons and pictures of followers? Reward random commenters with a vacation in Costa Rica? Just kidding. I’d love to hear from you, followers. It’s easy.