We are one-quarter into 2017, so I thought I would share some interesting (to me) data about where Red String PaperCuts stands in the World O’Blogging.

We’ve hit a couple of pretty big milestones in the last few months:

500 Posts!

We broke 500 total posts a week or two ago. I meant to celebrate it with a special 500th post thing, but I forgot… Oh well. 500 total posts is pretty sweet. You can actually see our post totals under the categories menu to the left, but here’s how it breaks down:

• I have 296 posts, including this one! I’m four away from 300! That’s a little crazy. At my current 3-post-per-week rate, I’ll hit 300 on April 15.
• Jessie has 173 posts, which is a lot considering she straight up forgets to post sometimes… looooooove yooouuu!
• Marcy has 24, which is not as low as it looks. She was basically contributing to two blogs at one point, posting regularly here and her own blog, Illustrated Poetry, which is pretty awesome if you have yet to check it out.
• And of course, eight guest posts. When we first started this site, we had high hopes that our guest submissions would compete with our own. They have not. Most of that is my fault. I stopped trying to get people to submit content a long time ago. Perhaps we’ll have to revive this effort at some point.

8,000 Visitors and 13,000 Views

Those are pretty big numbers. At our current pace, we’ll break 4,700 Visitors and 8,000 Views for 2017. That’s the minimum I want to hit.

Once my marketing efforts for WoEM ramp up later this year, I want to drive a lot more traffic to the site. I won’t be satisfied unless we hit 6,000 Visitors and 10,000 Views for the year.

This newer feature of the WordPress Stats page is pretty cool. It shows all-time view by month, and average views per day by month.

That image is a bit small, but you can see that we’ve broken 600 Views in four of the last five months, which is awesome. The next milestone is 700 Views (hopefully for April). I also want to break 600+ every month this year.

That’s the other newish feature. Right now, 19+ Views per day is considered high. I’m pretty sure the shading is scaled according to all-time performance, so the darkest shade is for 19+ daily Views per month. We’ve achieved that six of the last seven months. I’d like to average 20+ Views per day each month this year, but I also want to break and average of 30+ Views per day soon.

Top All-Time Post: Hozier… Still

My Hozier review from 2014 still tops the all-time View charts by a staggering margin… 3,641 Views since December 2014. What’s intersting is that I think this post may be on its downswing, finally. After garnering 28 views in December 2014 (when it was published), the post had a 2015 run of 930 views, and then stormed into 2,121 views for 2016.

Now, from September 2016 through February 2017, the post averaged 6-7 views per day. For March, it averaged 5. This could be a fluke (since March was slow in general for us), or it could be the beginning of a trend… is this post stale?

While it would be great to send more views to other posts, this album review has carried our search engine hits for two straight years. Will any of our other posts be able to fill that void if this one is eventually buried in SERPs?

I honestly doubt it. Our next highest post for Views is my Halestorm review, with 530… That’s not even close.

So, it may be time for a face-lift. I think my next marketing post will cover how I can better optimize “The Fever Dreams of Hozier” to continue to dominate our search engine rankings. But, that will have to come after our vacation.

There are other stats I can look at, but this post is already 600 words long. We have 285 followers, which is cool. The next goal there is obviously 300. Thanks for reading, everybody!

Steve D