Blog traffic, SEO and Twitter

"How I increased my blog traffic and made lots of money" seems to be one of the leading topics for discussion on the world's most visited blogs. Am I the only person to see an irony in this? Are the most popular blogs only being visited by swarms of bloggers, each desperate for the elixir that will give them financial freedom through blogging?

Other favourite topics at the moment are SEO (Search Engine Optimisation - or, how to get lots of people to find your website through Google) and Twitter - another method to generate blog traffic. It all seems rather incestuous.

In writing Author Intrusion, I have always been committed to the idea that there is an inherent value in communicating to the best of my ability about the things I feel passionately about. I have no idea where that will eventually lead or who will read it. But I believe that nothing we write is ever wasted.

With that in mind, you may be interested to see this graph, which shows the number of unique readers of this blog a day - calculated to the best of my ability. The number comes from a combination of those visiting the blog directly and those who read through subscription to a feed service. The other line in the graph shows the number of blog posts per week.

(Sorry about the unhelpful x-axis. The scale is the number of days since September last year - when I started offering the blog as an RSS feed. For the technically minded - the RSS statistics are automatically exported to a Microsoft Excel document, from which I produce the graph. Were I better at driving Excel, I would doubtless be able to make the x-axis labelling more helpful!)

You will notice that from day 1 to day 120 there was little change as the number of readers hovered around 15 a day. You will notice that since that time there has been a fairly steep growth to a present readership of around 80 a day. This is still a very small number compared to many blogs.

When a person begins to write - whether it is poetry, short story, a novel or a blog - there is the idea in their minds of an audience. It is almost as if the ghost of a potential reader is sitting in the room with them, patiently waiting. We may not ever get that five-figure publishing deal, but we like to think that someone - at least one person - will eventually witness what we have created. And if our work is witnessed, then it will have served a purpose.

So - I'd like to thank you for reading this. Particular thanks to regular readers and those who are kind enough to leave comments. You are all much appreciated.

And having said that, I must get back to writing the White Angel screenplay.