What’s it like to quit a successful blog and start from scratch? I’ll get into detail below.
I know a lot of people are wondering about this because a lot of people have asked. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll share with you stats from this site for January 2012. Keep in mind that these are from January 16 – January 31 as I launched the site mid-month.
You can imagine my stats are much lower than my previous site. Actually, it seems ~13% of RidiculouslyExtraordinary RSS and e-mail readers stayed with me in the transition. If that’s you, thanks!
# of Essays posted in January: 2
# of Free Ideas posted in January: 5
# of Quick Thoughts posted in January: 9
Google Analytics shows 3,602 unique visitors. Not very many considering this is ~2 days of visitors for my old site, but I’m still grateful for every one. I’m thrilled with the Avg Time On Site, but I suspect it will drop drastically in February.
Lots of referrers from my old site as well as from Twitter (t.co). Not a single other blog or personal website is in the Top 10 except for Dan’s TropicaMBA.com. Thanks for your support Dan!
I focus on e-mail subscriptions over RSS subscriptions. As you can probably tell, it’s almost impossible to even find the RSS subscription link. I have separate RSS subscriptions for Essays (click here), Free Ideas (click here), and Quick Thoughts (click here). I’m glad I did this, because the Free Ideas and Quick Thoughts are definitely a lot less popular. I enjoy posting them and will continue to do so.
Blacked out are RSS feeds for other websites. I’m not hiding anything (all my sites are public), but they’re not the focus of this post.
612 of you subscribed to the e-mail updates. This is a lot lower than I expected, but I’m happy to know that 612 of you actually want my updates.
Lessons Learned
I can’t say I learned anything particularly astounding here. I expected most of it. But it’s always nice to have thoughts confirmed.
- Transitions result in attrition. Massive attrition in this case.
- Without a real launch strategy traffic will be less than stellar. This was planned. I wanted to see how many readers would transition from my old site.
- Writing long articles results in a huge Avg Time On Site.
- There are almost 1,000 people who care enough to pay attention to what I’m up to!
Thank you for being here.
{ 13 comments }
I am part of the 13% *raise hand*
Good luck and all the best in this new endeavour. Yeeeha! :)
Thanks Daniel!
uhhhh… that was me clicking through 61 times.
My sense is a lot more of your old readers would want to follow you on the transition. I’ve noticed a lot of blog readers sorta go into 100% delete or ignore mode when they are in a busy patch, even if they do care about your publishing the emails from bloggers et all become secondary to colleagues and family.
Anywho… looking forward to following! Oh yeah, as a primary RSS and email subscriber, I’d love to receive a collected digest of your smaller stuff once a month or everyone other week or something. That would be of value to me.
haha, thanks for the 61 clicks Dan!
Also, thanks for the suggestion. I’m sending out a curated e-mail update on Monday. Depending on how many small posts I write per week I will likely do that every 1-2 weeks from here on out.
Never stopped a day following your blog. Always interesting to see what you achieve. As long as you write great articles i will not be going anywhere :-)
I’m an RSS reader (as opposed to an RSS Reader, I suppose). I much prefer reading the sites I follow in a Google Reader app on my iPhone, iPad, or MacBook than I do in my email inbox.
It wasn’t particularly hard to find the RSS feed for this site, but with Google Reader you don’t even need to find the link for most sites. Just enter the URL for the site on their web page and it finds the feed for you in most cases.
Thanks Drew. Yes, but I’m not sure most people are that advanced with their understanding of RSS. :)
I also prefer Google Reader to e-mail.
Hey Karol, as I always I love the blog updates.
I especially enjoyed getting the Free The Ideas updates via the Posterous daily subscription emails (I still see some in the Thlinks update… I thlink…)
Once I get this sorted it’ll be all good, again. Keep up the great work!
The Thlinks are now just off-the-cuff personal updates.
Free Ideas has its own RSS feed and you can subscribe to RSS via e-mail as well.
Karol,
I am immediately appreciative of the more contemplative and self- reflecting nature of your recent writings. The personal nature makes them a call to action without being a “call to action”
I hope to see more in this vein. Keep up the good work.
~Sage
Thanks Sage, I appreciate you sharing that.
Loving the new content and following along on your adventures, man. Thanks for sharing this post as well, very interesting. Keep it up!
Thank you Rick.
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