Well, not in pounds or dollars. But, according to WordPress.com and to my considerable surprise, this blog has now had over a million impressions since I started it, 3 and a bit years ago.
OK, I know Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood probably wouldn’t get out of bed for a meagre million impressions, but I still couldn’t resist crowing about it.
As you can see in the graph below the traffic is very uneven, dominated by a few posts that made it on to the front page of social news sites.
In fact over 40% of the total impressions come from just 5 (2%) of the posts:
| Post | Impressions |
| The software awards scam | 234,909 |
| 10 things non-technical users don’t understand about your software | 55,291 |
| Lessons learned from 13 failed software products | 51,676 |
| Your harddrive *will* fail – it’s just a question of when | 47,505 |
| Where I program | 47,075 |
Here are a few things I have learnt along the way:
- As with many things in life, persistence is the key.
- Choose your audience and write for that audience.
- Pick a realistic posting schedule and try to stick to it.
- Find your own voice.
- The titles of posts are important.
- Don’t expect lots of clickthroughs from social media sites to translate to lots of subscribers.
- Get your posts proof read (thanks Claire!).
- I am lousy at predicting how much interest a particular blog post will generate.
- Don’t blog about blogging.
- Be prepared to break the rules from time to time.
Although time is sometimes scarce for blogging I have lots of ideas for future blog posts. But if there is anything you would particularly like to see on this blog, please leave a comment.
Successful Software 
Well done! Congratulations!
Congratulations on your success! I’m envious! LOL
I’m also a millionaire. 0a0
Bravo and congrat’s Andy!!
Link bait! I thought maybe someone like Hallmark bought Perfect Table Plan!!!
Congratulations Andy!
BTW, did you know your last two posts have been listed on Planet MicroISV by the alt text of the first image, instead of the title?
I thought “lenticular clouds over Mount Sefton, New Zealand” was an odd title for the last post, but now it makes sense!
Yes, I did know that, thanks. I have bought it to the attention of the owner.
Note to the person imitating Jeff Atwood – you’ll need to try harder than that.
“Don’t blog about blogging.” :-)
Well done, Andy, keep up the good work.
You put a lot of effort into your posts, it is quite obvious. In some cases, it seems that the post took hours and days of research. While I very much appreciate the content and benefit from reading it, would you say you have a positive ROI here?
>would you say you have a positive ROI here?
No. So far the ratio of financial rewards to effort has been low. But it is very much a long term investment. And money isn’t everything. Hopefully I have at least helped a few people avoid some of the mistakes I have made.
Congrats to the 1 Million!
And thanks for pointing me to a few more of your extremely interesting articles. I really enjoyed reading “The software awards scam”.
Congratulations Andy. I’m not surprised though … whenever I see your RSS feed “highlighted” (indicating there is new content) I “always” click to see what is new … that is not true with a lot of blogs I follow … but, it is with yours. I have learned a lot from your writings. Thanks!
Chris
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