The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for Weekends in Paradelle.
My little blog had more than 56,000 views this past year bringing our life total to almost 193,000 views. I really had hoped to cross the 200,000 mark by year’s end, but it’s just a calendar moment.
In 2012, there were 176 new posts (and 126 images) growing the total archive of this blog to 587 posts.
The busiest day of the year was March 20th with 817 views. The most popular post that day was a Spring Equinox post from 2011. That was followed by “The Red Thread” from March 2012, then “The Retirement Village of Lotus Eaters” from 2009, “Mindfulness” from 2010 and in fifth place another 2012 post on “The Cold Wolf Moon After The Yule.” Bloggers don’t look at those old posts getting all the attention as a bad thing. It means your post has a “long tail” and that people are finding you through searches. As you build up an archive of posts, the older ones tend to accumulate the most hits.
I also look at the referring sites that brought people to the blog. In past years, it was search engines like Google that led people to click a link to the site, but in 2012 social media made a big impact. The top referrers (in order) were facebook.com (links on my own pages) and from two accounts I have on twitter.com that have links when I post something new here. In third place is astrosurf.com which I knew nothing about. I have since discovered that it is a French site that focuses on astronomy and has linked to a number of my posts. Pinterest.com – the image-based site – is one I use only for my poetry life. And networkedblogs.com is the way that I push my blogging to Facebook.
Many visitors still come to this site via a search. They don’t normally search for the actual topics of the posts, but for more general topics. As I have written before, searches for Mt. Fuji continue to be a big draw. Also words like sad, depression and mindfulness are common searches. I hope that those searchers find something useful here. All of the calendar events, like an equinox and the Full Moon posts, generate hits whenever those event come around.
People visited Paradelle from 163 countries, but the majority are from The United States. The United Kingdom and Canada, which is what I would expect.
The post from this past year that generated the most commenting (still a rare event on posts in general) was “The Red Thread.”
Weekends in Paradelle 