Saturday 11 March 2017

Happy Fourth Birthday Upon Hope!

Here we are at another milestone, this blog was started four years ago today. I'd been thinking about starting a blog for around six months and then I just decided I needed to do it and to stop thinking about it. Whats good about blogging is that it's yours, you can write more or less, what you want when you want, your the master of your own destiny in a sense. But that means that your also responsible for all of the foggy thinking, bad writing and for the lack of posts. Of course like anything you do it does tend to get better over time, although looking back at early posts I think most are good and a few are very good.

There are however things you cannot control, the amount of visitors to the blog for example. That is one of the biggest reasons that most blogs stop is because they lack an audience. And it's hard to get an audience, although some manage to get big visitor numbers quickly that's not normal. Normally the numbers creep up slowly and in my experience they occasionally fall. Strangely there often seems to be no rhyme or reason for the numbers going up or down. For example one of the great mysteries I have here are my Russian visitors, other countries sometimes do the same thing, but they tend to arrive and disappear in a big group. As if someone has linked to an article of mine, but I never get a particular article going up, nor do I get a URL that has sent them, quite strange.

I have had 104,327 visitors since I started, 38,000 in the last year.

My most clicked on article is What do Traditional Conservatives believe? which has been clicked on 4, 616 times. My least clicked on article is Australian suicide bomber? which has been clicked on 31 times.

Over the past year the percentage of my visitors has hardly changed from last year, around 45% are Americans, around 15% are Australian and the remaining 40% come from the rest of the world. No other country has more than 10%, Russia is around 8%.

Here are some graphs that Blogger gives me.

Graph of Blogger page views
You can see three big spikes, from left to right the first is from March 2015, the second which is the biggest is from July 2016 and the third spike is last month, February 2017. My worst month in the past year was June 2016 when I had a dismal 1,890 visitors. I say dismal because thats worse than any month from the year before. But my best was the very next month, July 2016 when I had the best month ever with 5,575 visitors, around 3000 of them Russians. The graph seems to end on a downward trend, but that is for the first 10 days of this month only.

Below are the top 10 posts followed by how many clicks they have received.

What do Traditional Conservatives believe? 4616

Free-Trade Versus Protectionism 2990

Why Don't the Poor Marry? 2459

Why Do Conservatives Believe in Different Social Classes? 2277

Feminism, Why We Are Not Feminists 1760

What is More Important, the Past, the Present or the Future? 1699

Housewives, Good For the Economy and Society 1217

The Discrimination of Anti-Discrimination 1121

The Balanced Society 1109

The Problems of Monarchy 926

Now if you look at this list and the one on the front face of the blog you'll find they are different. I believe the one on the front page is weighed, meaning the more recent the numbers the greater the weight it carries so it goes up in importance.

Okay I still don't know the difference between a "Referring URL" and a "Referring Site".

Referring URLs

Referring Sites

Search Keywords

EntryPageviews
uponhopeblog.blogspot.com
59
upon hope
36
free trade vs protectionism
32
free trade versus protectionism
17
traditional conservatism
14
upon hope blog
9
protectionism vs free trade
7
content
6
conclusion of multiculturalism
5
free trade and protectionism
5

Here is a map of the top 10 countries to have visited the blog in the last four years.

Pageviews by Countries

Graph of most popular countries among blog viewers
EntryPageviews
United States
41645
Australia
17455
Russia
7797
United Kingdom
4167
Germany
2802
France
2282
Canada
2139
Ukraine
1331
Netherlands
850
China
741
The United States and Australia are in the same position as last year. Russia and the United Kingdom have swapped places as have Germany and France. Canada and the Ukraine are in the same positions and China and the Netherlands have swapped places.

I hoped for a bigger and better year this year and got it so here's hoping for another year that's bigger and better!

And finally if no one read what I wrote I would give up, so thank you for coming along and making it worthwhile!

Mark Moncrieff

Upon Hope Blog - A Traditional Conservative Future
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6 comments:

  1. Keep up the great work Mark, you are a titan of our community.

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    1. Thank you Pond Observer, to be called a Titan is quite a compliment!

      Mark Moncrieff

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  2. I am a californian, born and raised. As a housewife who believes in traditional values, I often feel like John of Brave New World. I am often bewildered left trying to make sense of my community where mom's think taking their 2nd grade daughters to Nicki Minaj for their birthday is a good idea. I am so thankful to blogs such as yours who insprire me to keep up the good fight...even encouraging me to argue my case more loudly, intelligently..hoping to inspire others to change direction...so my two daughters are not alone on the path I am carving that I hope they follow. Thank you.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Gwen, it's good to know that people such as yourself find some value in what I write.

      Taking a 2nd grader to a Nick Minay concert is just mind boggling!

      And keep up the good fight!

      Mark Moncrieff

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  3. More hits and reads from the United States than even your own nation!!

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    Replies
    1. In only 4 months out of a total of 48 has the United States not been the top country, so I'm used to it. In the other 4 months, Australia was the top country.

      I must admit that when numbers were small I felt like most of the visitors from Australia might even be me. So those visitors from outside of Australia were most welcome.

      Mark Moncrieff

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