Losing 30,000 Visitors Annually

YEAR-END STATS from three sources confirm something I've know for several years--I'm shedding around 30,000 annual visitors to my blog.

At the current rate of decline, I wonder how strong the long tail of my blog actually is. I know that if I don't post anything for one week, I'll attract an average of 88 visitors per day. If I let the blog idle for more than a month, I doubt more than 20 visitors would stop by every day. I wonder what might boost the annual visitor count back to the 100,000 mark. I've put this blog post up on Google Plus where I expect to read the opinion of some clever commentators.

There are structural reasons why my blog has eroded readership. The biggest reason is related to internal links remaining broken by misconfigured DNS records. Because robots cannot crawl my website without encountering a broken link, both Archive.org and the Google index fail to show thousands of pages that I have published since 2001. I've started a process of correcting that but it will take more than a year to regain traction.

The main reason my blog has shed readership lies in the rise of Twitter and Facebook. You don't have to visit my website to see what I've written here. You can merely read its content via newsfeed or take the 140-character summary. That's not going to change. The distractions of microblogs have affected others.

If you're a regular reader and you've clicked over onto the main blog site for a root-around, I'd like to also add you to the first G+ Circle that opens on my mobile phone. Leave a comment and I'll catch up with you in the microchannel.

Happy 2012!

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