This is a rambling meta post, because on occasion it feels like the right time to talk shop.
One thing that has become much easier and cheaper to figure out in recent years, when writing a blog, is how much traffic you are getting and where it is coming from. WordPress gives you a statistics page that captures both incoming and outgoing traffic, and gives you a good sense of even minor developments. For instance, daily traffic is given in both views and visitors. At least in a blog like that the two tend to be the same or close together. If there’s a lot of views with not many visitors, you know someone is binge-reading your blog for whatever reason. A strange sense of pride results.
Having so much information can cause an identity crisis of sorts, though. In the past year, traffic here has risen considerably. Though not very high compared to mainstream blogs, July 2014 will end up being about 250% the traffic of September 2013. Unspoken Politics has gone from a writing exercise with very little traffic to a healthy enterprise.
What the metrics tell me- views, likes, subscriptions- is that the things I get the most fun out of writing isn’t what gets new readers. I’ve tried to make the core of this website fact-based analysis of current events. Below that, the odd polemic is pretty refreshing. Tier three is poetry and news photography, which gets way more attention than the previous two. Not that I don’t like writing poetry, it’s a great way to work on certain writing skills that could always use practice, but it’s a side gig. The reason poetry showed up to begin with is that I didn’t want the site to lie dormant when I didn’t have the time or will to post a substantive prose piece.
This is a State of the Union, I suppose. The blog is doing better each month, the content seems to be well-received, and this endeavor will continue. If I end up doing a college radio show this fall, there may be some new stuff about music. We’ll see.
Unspoken Politics 