No Longer In Control At the Bloghaus

I used to feel like I had some control over the number of page views I had each day at The Strait Line. If I didn't publish something every day, or share several stories a day to Facebook, the numbers would greatly suffer.

No more.

I noticed in February, when I had a loss of Internet service for about a week and a half, that my page view numbers did not crash as much as I thought they would.  I went from about an average of 80 or more a day to closer to 60.  A drop to be sure, but not as spectacular as I feared.

Then in March, with my high speed Internet as a companion, my numbers have rapidly accelerated.  My highest average page views in a month prior to March was 85.  So far this month, my average is 125, a very substantial increase and the greatest growth I have experienced.  My previous high total for a month was 2,694.  I am now well over 3,100 and I still have six days in the month.

Posts that I do not re-post to Facebook are starting to do very well.  Some must be at other sites or locations, and people link into the stories.  I Made My Business!  Me! Myself! I!  gets several views a day and is well over a thousand.  In the Heart of the Strep, Carnies vs. Rubes, Authentic Frontier Gibberish, Spell Me A River, are also wildly popular.  Some fiction is starting to take off, particularly A Vigil at the Honey Dew.  The post I have that most recently has taken off is Same Sex Blessing: Struggling With A Vestry Letter.  It has been shared by a number of people on Facebook, something that has made me very happy.  I love it when people share my posts.

Not all is good news, though.  Sometimes the comments I get back are spam.  I've tried my hardest to make it as easy as possible to post comments, and that may have left me open to people who just want to promote their own sites.  I review my comments daily and delete those that seem to be off-color, off-topic and self-promotional.

The revenue generated by the site has not increased at the same rate as the page views. It continues to be erratic and unpredictable. But what can I do except to keep trying and not let go of my day job quite yet.

Thanks for reading!  This post is a little more insider baseball than most, but for those interested, I thought I would update you on how the blog is doing.  Thanks so much for your support!