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.
The good folk at WordPress (where this blog is hosted) are offering a 
Successful Software 