My first post today I am going to talk about my blog’s traffic. I started my blog back on July 4, 2006. I had 2 uniques on that day, and most likely they were both me (one from work and one from home). I have to block my ip addresses from all the locations I look at my site from so I don’t cheat my stats.

The reason why I wanted to do a quick look over my blogs traffic stats since the beginning is because the last two days I have broke over 100 uniques each day. That’s the first time I have had back to back 100 unique days. Might not seem like a lot to you, but to me that is a good sign that this blog is growing. 100 readers is a lot!

September 2006 was the only month since launch where my blog saw a decrease in traffic. It was a small decrease of only 21 uniques. That’s less than 1 person a day. Since then, my blog has been growing at an average rate of almost 300 uniques/month. Below is a graph (click to make it bigger) of my exact statcounter statistics.

Notice the number return uniques (yellow bar) as well as the number of daily uniques (blue bar) and page views (green bar). Return uniques has gone up every single month, except September.

The reason my September stats are lower than usual, is because of the server problems I was having. You may remember I used to own that horrible proxy that cause my server to crash every 10 minutes. I lost a lot of traffic during those times. Without the crashes I expect to have seen steady growth.

The gradual increase in return visits also leads me to believe people like my site and enjoy my posts. At my current pace I should surpass 2,000 uniques this month. And if my site continues to grow at this rate I will be near 5,000 uniques/month this time next year.

Ultimately, I’d like to increase that number quite a bit, and be closer to 10,000 uniques/month next year. I think I can reach that goal if I stick with it. If only I could follow in John Chow’s footsteps in building traffic…