That's not to say the blog is in it's absolute prime, views have halved over the last 6 months, except for August when I was slightly more proactive sharing pics of my Genestealer Cult To Done pics on Reddit. But I've said before that hobby-blogging should be a personal record of your efforts first and foremost. When starting out you will unlikely have an audience so you have to do it for yourself. Therefore the pursuit of numbers is a lesser concern. By nature we crave validation and numbers and milestones [arbitrary and real] have always been a way to keep momentum in your blog, it just shouldn't be your prime motivator.
I'd be false in saying the drop in numbers hadn't been a little disappointing though. There's possibly a belief that a blog will continue to grow and grow, that more followers will generate more followers. But I think a lot of the views are being generated by my own efforts to promote the blog, which is time-consuming and gets in the way of actual hobby. Using a variety of social media groups and forums helps bring new people to the blog but converting them to regular readers is another thing.
An additional theory might be people are just following the blog in a different way - maybe using a reader of some sort. I don't know at this stage, I'm beginning to think that blogging in this form might be on the wane, for those that somehow make a living off it I think they're delivering more a personalised website, not the traditional blogspot experience we, in the hobby, might be more familiar with. Either that or folk are just jumping straight into YouTube channels, which is far simpler to monetise...
But I've had a number of people profess that they find the blog much easier to engage with than YouTube, it's certainly less data hungry, which for those that commute and need a consistent data connection blogs are a much safer media choice. What also amazes me that in the 1,369 posts I've made is just how much I've actually written. I found a website that claimed to perform a deep word count of any URL, including all it's related links. I think it had some maximum amount of links [5,000 or so] but it managed to parse at least 1,035 of the pages on my blog before the system seemed to hang. At that stage it calculated I'd written 2,168,810 words, not surprising considering I never quite got the hang of the 'Brevity' component of the 'A,B,C of modern communications'. So my estimate with an average of 2,095 words per post is around 2.9 millions words over the last 7 years...
Just to put that in context further Winston Churchill's corpus of works is 50 million words, 13 million of which he wrote himself, and this from a man who did preach brevity! Lets face it I've never done anything as significant as Churchill and my battles are trivial when compared to those he faced but nearly three million words on toy soldiers... man, I need to get a life ha, ha!
Cheers guys, you make this all worthwhile ;)
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