Sometime this last week, Opinionbypen had its 10,000^th page view. For those of you who, like myself, love numbers, that’s an average of 556 views a month or 18 views a day.  I’m proud of that number because those are page views by real humans, not bots. If I counted visits from bots the number would be well over 1,000,000.

When I started writing Opinionbypen I had no idea what to expect. I certainly expected many more than 18 visitors a day but I did not realize just how stiff the competition for your time was. Somehow I imagined huge numbers of you out there eager to read whatever you could find. Once I realized I was part of those huge numbers navigating the internet, I understood just how wrong I was.

I realize that Opinionbypen was and still is an attempt by me to gain recognition and impress everyone with my deep thoughts and creativity. Feel impressed yet? Neither am I, but along the way I discovered I enjoyed writing and now Opinionbypen is less to impress you and more to share thoughts and different views with you. Of course, I still want you to be impressed by my writing and my artwork. Just in case you missed them (Poser gallery)

There was a brief time when I  considered that I could just set up my blog, set back and watch the money roll in. I was so wrong. Depending on what you are advertising, it takes approximately 10,000 visitors a month before a blog is making money. Sooner or later I will put up some advertising but it will be less about making money and more to experience that part of blogging.

I’ve certainly learned the value of SEO (Social Engineering Optimization). If you are starting a blog or considering starting a blog, learn all you can about SEO. That’s how Google finds, ranks you and brings people to your site. You may remember my other site, Fromthedoghouse.com. A blog devoted to dogs, what was not to like? Try as I would, I could never get a good handle on the SEO for that site. Now it gets about one visitor a week. I’ve stopped updating it while I consider how to improve it.

That brings me to comments. Fromthedoghouse.com gets lots of comments each week. Comments telling me how that article was exactly what they were looking for or there’s more information on that subject at their website or just telling me go to their site for the best in handbags. In case you wonder, this is the reason I have you sign in with your name and an email address to leave a comment. I don’t want to track you. I don’t intend to sell your name to my friend down at the feed store. I just want to make sure you are not a bot leaving spam comments. If I were to change that policy, I would be flooded by comments having nothing to do with my website.

Out of those 10,000 views, I have 122 comments. Slightly over one percent of the views give comments. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad ratio. When I start feeling bad about the sparsity of comments, I go to CNET and read the comments to any of the articles. They get a lot of comments but if you subtract points for stupid, meaningless and trolling (these are the people deliberately trying to start arguments) comments, I really appreciate my readers. You may not comment as much as I would like but I don’t have to moderate your comments either.

That brings me to the last element of Opinionbypen, you. Hmm, somehow that fails to show just how important you are to this blog. I think I’ll try again.

Without you and the 10,000 pages you’ve looked at, Opinionbypen would be another ghost blog floating in the internet, waiting on that one visitor a week to shake the cobwebs off (in case you missed it, that was my Halloween reference). Your comments and your support are why I spend my time writing this blog instead of playing Rift. Your comments and support have also inspired me to learn more about writing, more about making artwork in Poser and a little more about sharing. It’s been a long journey and we’ve still got far to go. Thanks for coming with me on this journey.

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