Numbers game

I logged in to my blog just now and my eyes almost boggled out of my head.

My view numbers were through the roof!

Leading the charge was my post on 7 July about why you should not join the early childhood industry. As of the time of this writing, it has accumulated almost 50 views. To real bloggers, those are rookie statistics, but to me they are amazing. I'm more accustomed to seeing single-digit counts.

My other posts benefited from the popularity of the early childhood article too. My Independence Day post breached the 10-view mark, and all the rest had a couple of views more than before.

From my back-end side, I can access some data on where the views are coming from. I was delighted to see that people from as far afield as Australia, India, Germany, France, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines had visited my blog. But it was in the section detailing the referring URLs that I found the key to my blog's sudden success.

I recently started a Twitter account. Regular readers of this blog will know that I'll be entering the university soon and intend to study Communications and New Media. My decision to get onto Twitter was born out of the realisation that it would be horribly ironic if I were to ostensibly be a student and perhaps even an eventual practitioner of new media technology while not being adept at using such a major new media platform. Previously I had avoided Twitter as I didn't believe that anything useful could come out of 140 characters. However, I now realise that 140 characters is enough for effective communication as long as messages are crafted to be concise. Indeed, using Twitter is great for developing good writing habits as it forces you to think long and hard while trying to get your point across within the limit. Do you really need that word? When in doubt, cut it out.

The other day while scrolling through my Twitter feed, I came across a picture of a funny typo error that a preschool staff had made in a letter meant for parents. I retweeted the picture with a comment that the teacher must've been tired and fed up with her life, and a link to my blog post about the dark side of the early childhood industry.

Most of the recent traffic to my blog came from Twitter and I believe this Tweet was responsible. Unlike my Facebook account, my Twitter and Instagram are not tightly secured as they don't have flexible privacy settings and locking them up defeats the purpose of having them in the first place. So everyone can see my Tweets. I think somehow people did, and clicked through to my blog.

There was also a secondary effect from Facebook. My Tweets are set to automatically publish to my Facebook too, so the link to my early childhood post appeared on my Facebook as well. My mother reshared the link to her own Facebook and it was seen by her network of friends. This further boosted the reach of the post to a wider audience, including some of her schoolmates who have since moved overseas.

It was certainly a pleasant surprise getting those numbers but I'm keeping both feet planted firmly on the ground. Realistically speaking, unless I repeatedly pull the same stunt of putting links on Twitter, I'm not going to be able to sustain such high viewership statistics for long. Things will simply go back to the way they were before, with each post getting the baseline of around 3 to 4 views.

And that's okay with me. This blog is just an outlet for my itch to write. I don't earn money from it so there's no urgency to increase my site visits. Of course it's always better when people read what I write, and the relative "fame" was nice while it lasted. But I'll keep writing regardless, because it brings me a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment, never mind the numbers.