Today is the 4 year anniversary of this daily blog.
Sure, I’ve missed a few days over the years (my estimate is 4-5 days), but for the most part I have shown up here every day and written something.
Sometimes that something is very short and/or bad. I’ve had a few people say to me: “I can tell when you’re super busy. Your posts are shorter.” I’m okay with that. Part of this exercise for me is simply about the discipline. 80% of success is showing up, right?
In some ways, what I do here is an anachronism. Here is a good vintage article (2011) that talks about two different schools of thought when it comes to blogging.
The reality is that it’s painfully slow and difficult to build an online audience via a personal blog using your own domain. It takes years, unless you’re a celebrity, which I am most certainly not. That’s why many people give up.
Instead, many people/influencers choose to build their audience on top of an existing network, such as YouTube, Instagram, or Medium. Medium is pretty tempting and I’ve seen lots of bloggers port over their personal blogs.
The idea here is that you simply bring your content to where your/an audience already lives, instead of trying to get them to come to you.
Of course, one of the risks of this approach is that you don’t own/control the platform. What if people one day decided to stop using MySpace? I like the idea of owning (at least part of) my online presence.
So here’s to another year on the blog. Thanks for reading! I really do appreciate it. Regular scheduled programming will resume tomorrow.
On Wednesday, August 28th, 2013 at 8:33am, I wrote and posted this.
And that started a 2 year tradition of writing something on this blog, every, single, day, no matter how long or short it might be and no matter how insightful or not insightful it might be. It kick started a discipline.
For the most part, I tend to write about city building and everything that feeds into that, whether it be design, planning, transportation, technology, or real estate. But I also write personal posts, especially when I go snowboarding. And the longer I write this blog, the more comfortable I feel writing those sorts of posts.
Sometimes I feel guilty about those posts though, since I assume most of you are here to learn and talk about city building things. I assume you don’t want to hear about me. But at the end of the day, ATC is a personal blog. It’s not a business or corporate blog, and I like to think that the personal touches help make the content more engaging over time.
Regardless, a big thank you to everyone who reads, subscribes, and follows Architect This City. There are few things more gratifying than hearing someone say they love this blog and that they read it every morning when they wake up.
That’s a huge commitment on their/your part and I am grateful for that. Because my commitment (writing this blog) wouldn’t be nearly as fun if you weren’t all around to engage with and learn from. And in the early days of writing this blog, there truly was nobody around.
So for today’s 2 year anniversary post, I thought I would share some readership stats. Last Friday I posted a map of all of this blog’s email subscribers (in anticipation of today’s post). But today we’re going to get into some hard numbers (from Google Analytics).
Here are the high level stats from the past year.
Here are the number of visitors (users) over the last year. It feels great to see it increasing. The spikes are posts that, for whatever reason, really took off.
Here’s how people discovered this blog. Almost half of the visitors to this blog are just searching around online and stumble upon it.
And finally, here are the demographics. I only turned this feature on a few weeks ago, so the data set isn’t as large as above. Still, it’s probably pretty accurate. I need to work on correcting the gender imbalance here.
And there you have it. Thanks again for reading. If you have any suggestions for the third year of Architect This City, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment below. Here’s to another year!
Can you believe that it’s already been one full year of Architect This City? Well it has. I wrote this quick post on August 28, 2013 and it kick started a yearlong discipline of writing something everyday (usually) about cities.
In celebration of this one year anniversary, I thought I would open up the kimono and provide a full look at what one year of regular blogging looks like in terms of the numbers, as well as in terms of the benefits that I feel I derived from it. So here goes.
Below are my pageviews from Google Analytics (the number at the top of the Y-axis is 10,000). As you can see, it’s been a slow and steady climb:
Here are the top 10 countries that read Architect This City (also from Google Analytics):
Here are the 5 most read posts from the last year (notice a trend?):
And here’s where I sit in terms of followers and subscribers:
Twitter (@donnelly_b): 1,364 followers
Facebook (ATC Page): 152 likes (relatively new addition)
Tumblr: 2,592 followers
Email Subscribers: 871
When I started blogging, I already had a few hundred Twitter followers, but probably less than 100 Tumblr followers, and absolutely 0 email subscribers. Interestingly enough, it took almost 11 months to get to 250 Tumblr followers, but only another 3 days to break the 2,000 mark. So these things definitely snowball.
But the numbers really only tell one side of the story.
Over the past year I’ve had the privilege of meeting a ton of great people as a result of me putting myself out there publicly. In fact, it has now reached the point where I just can’t keep up with all the requests for coffee. I hate saying no (or forgetting about the email), but there’s only so much time in the day. Regardless though, I’m always flattered and entirely grateful that somebody actually wants to hear what I have to say. So I try and take as many meetings as I can.
Blogging everyday is certainly a lot of work. But it’s no different than keeping any other routine (like going to the gym) and there are countless benefits to doing so. If you’ve ever thought about starting a blog, I would encourage you to give it a try. Once you get rolling, it actually becomes hard to stop.