Old Year Goal Achieved; New Year Resolution on Standby

Awhile back, I noticed that the number of blog posts here at KN@PPSTER was running below median for the years I've been blogging.

I wanted to bring in 2011 at least in the middle of the pack on that, so I resolved to hit 200 posts by year end. I got there yesterday.

I've tried to keep it interesting and not to resort to Glenn-Reynolds-style "[link] ... heh" or "this is blog post #182" or anything like that. And hey, in the space of a month, my daily traffic has popped up from 80 or so visits per day to around 200 and climbing (admittedly there was a "Christmas bump" of people finding my posts about Android tablets and e-readers vis Google, but I'll take that).

So, time to set some 2012 goals, in the form of New Year resolutions. They're both pretty simple, and the first should be pretty easy:

1. I resolve to average a minimum of one blog post per day, seven days a week, in 2012; and
   
2. I resolve to increase traffic to a minimum of 500 visits per day by next spring, 1,000 visits per day by next fall, and 10,000 visits per week by year end (without any gimmickry like purchased traffic, "black hat" SEO, etc.).
   

I rely on Sitemeter for my web stats. They don't track 24-hour unique visitors, but rather "visits." If a user is off-site for more than 30 minutes, then comes back, that's a second "visit." But generally speaking, I think uniques and visits tend to converge as the numbers go up (i.e. regular readers who drop by several times a day become a smaller and smaller percentage of traffic). I keep an eye on my stats, and about half my traffic seems to be "organic" -- it comes in from the search engines, and in most cases not due to any conscious keyword-crunching on my part. I write about what I'm interested in, and voila ... other people who are interested in the same things find me.

The rest of the traffic comes in from Facebook (I've got the blog hooked into the "Networked Blogs" app so that every post gets noted on my profile/wall), links from other bloggers, reader retweets, that sort of thing. Every once in awhile I blow $5 or $10 on an ad on another blog, but the click-thru ratio has never been stellar. And in that vein, a big THANK YOU to all of you who re-tweet my posts, "like" them on Facebook and so forth.

Anyway, the point being that if I'm blogging daily, I think I can hit those traffic goals over time.

KN@PPSTER isn't really a commercial enterprise from my point of view, but I figure that at 10,000 visits per week, I can probably knock down enough advertising mad money to do additional cool stuff (perhaps a perhaps blogathon powered by an expensive bottle of absinthe, or maybe some kind of reader contest that has actual valuable prizes).