The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. I’m not sure if people are interested in this thing or not, but the WordPress.com helper monkeys sent me this report and offered me a link that would allow me to share it with my readers, so at least in the opinion of the helper monkeys, some people might think it’d be a cool thing to see. What’s most interesting to me is the info right out of the gate there, which you don’t even have to see the whole report to get, and that is that 2013 was my best year. 7,600 views. I have nothing to compare that to, so I don’t know if I have a hit or a dud; what I do know is that I’ve been doing this for two full years plus now, and with a total number of views at 10,737, my readership has, in the last year, how do I say, blossomed–at least comparatively speaking. Hey, all you readers: thanks so much for that!
For those of you blogging and for those of you otherwise interested, I have two theories about my bumper year. On my best day ever here at michaeljarmer.com, I stirred up some controversy. Actually, I didn’t stir it, somebody else did–by reading a particular blog entry I’d written about the rigors of teaching writing for your average high school English teacher and then by posting the link on Reddit with the headline “This Guy Is What’s Wrong With Education in America” or something to that effect. So, one lesson about getting more readership might be to piss someone off to the extent that they would say nasty things about you on some other social network site and post links to your blog. That was an interesting experience, but it consumed me for several days running, and that was bad. It wasn’t all bad. Readers stood up to the guy and defended me–people I didn’t know, and that was good. And of course, it was my busiest day ever, and that was good.
My other busiest time of the year was during the cruelest month of April when I participated in the NaPoWriMo, meeting the challenge of writing a poem a day every day for a month. And here’s the other wisdom nugget: a way to increase readership is to post something every day. That’s it–but you already knew that. That’s no easy task–for so many reasons, not the least of which is time, and not the least of which is the problem of having a new idea every day–those two reasons are often insurmountable for people. I doubt very much I could sustain that for any longer than a month, not without neglecting things around the house, or neglecting people around the house, or neglecting work and sleep around the house. And as far as I can tell, I’m not earning anything, monetarily speaking, from my blog. That might be a game changer. Anyone want to pay me to do this? For right now, I do it because I dig it, and for now, that’s good enough.
Again, thanks so much for being here, for reading, for commenting or not, for sharing or not, and even for saying nasty things about me on Reddit. I couldn’t have done it without you, without all of your 7,600 views. Happy New Year and happy blogging.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,600 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.
michael jarmer 
In the spirit of continuing to be your most prolific commenter, I’ll leave one here. We got one of these reports on our blog, too. I love graphs and charts, so I thought it was pretty cool. I’m impressed you have readers form 95 countries! Totally hear you on the time factor for keeping up. We’re trying to publish one every week, and we’ve done it, but not without some cost. Looking forward to reading more in 2014. Cheers! E&J
Thanks, E&J. Hey, don’t you guys have a cheap brandy brand? Anyway, yeah, for real, thank you so much for your support in particular. It really means a great deal to me because I think the both of you are terrific human beans. And Happy New Year to you both, and happy travels!