Monumental Thoughts.com celebrates its third anniversary wondering how it really did this past year.
Those evil spammers messed up my google analytics reports for six months. Every day they’d try about 100 times to leave messages and links for whatever. It’s the reason I don’t allow comments on posts. Finally, on Aug. 12, they gave up, but not after tainting the numbers.
Bummer.
So, here’s my best guess. About 16,000 visitors came to the site over 2013. Google was my best friend, attracting 7,936, followed by Twitter 2,096, Yahoo 829, bing 731, reddit 610, facebook 209, dcblogs 188, ask 154, realredskins 113, writemeg 79 and Capitalphotohistorytours 76.
Now the depressing thought: among top 10 read stories, none was anything I wrote in the past year besides the main page, which has the most recent posts. Rocks atop stones at Arlington National Cemetery was the runaway leader with 25,447 pageviews over how to find a name on the Vietnam Wall with 4,685. The Court of Neptune fountain, photo gallery, Canal keeper’s house and About Rick Snider were also popular for third straight year.
As for readers, U.S. was about 80 percent of traffic followed by the U.K., Canada, Japan, Germany and India respectively.
So what’s up for 2014? I wish I knew. After a very hard 2013 when losing many family members and friends plus my regular job at a newspaper, I’m now balancing freelance writing, tour guiding, real estate and finishing a book. I’m so glad to kiss 2013 goodbye and hope for a better year to come for myself as well as all of you.
The blog will continue, but since I’ve filed more than 650 posts I don’t do as many individual monuments as observations and happenings around town. Either way, life’s a journey.
