Milestones are sort of weird. They can be easy to lose track of until you’re sitting right on top of them. I stopped myself from doing one of these stats update posts until we had hit a real milestone.

Well, I stopped paying attention, and here we are well over 20,000 Views and 13,000 visitors all-time. Sweet!

Since we’re through the first quarter of 2018, I wanted to have a look at some other recent numbers.

Overall, 2018 has been solid for RSPC to this point. In March, we had our highest Visitor total (442) since October, and our second-highest visitor total ever for a single month.

That’s all well and good, but if you’ve read these posts before, you know I like to prognosticate a bit about our future performance. So given our audience numbers thus far in 2018, here’s how we’re looking for the year.

• Our 1,189 Visitors so far would give us 4,756 Visitors for the year, slightly above 2017’s total.
• 1,842 Views breaks out to 7,368, about 150 Views less than in 2017. More on this in a second.
• 564 Likes equates to about 2,256 for the whole year,
• And 26 comments is looking like about 104 by December.
• We’re also at 389 followers, up from 358 at the end of 2017.

All of this is to say that 2018 is looking a lot like 2017 in terms of organic performance. Our Visitors will hit the mid-4000s, and our Views would come in just under 2017’s total.

This is significant (to me), because this is the first year since we started in 2014 that our first-quarter numbers do not project out to eclipsing the previous year’s totals.

I will never complain about 4,000 people visiting our website in a year, but if this trend continues, 2018 could be the first “plateau” year we hit as a website: our performance is steady but does not improve noticeably.

The Next Stage

Now, perhaps we’ve hit a stage where organic audience growth is a bit slower than before. Exponential increases in stats year over year would, after all, clearly violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But, I think there’s something to be said for this plateau. Perhaps we are transitioning from a Micro Blog to a… Small Blog. After all, I often see other blogs I follow announce when they’ve hit 400 or 500 followers. However, I see far fewer posts about hitting 1,000, or 5,000 followers. That indicates that while getting to 400-500 range is certainly hard work, getting over it can be even harder.

I think my PPC campaigns for my book will help drive those numbers up, not just in immediate terms. I’ll look for that little marketing push to bring eyes to our site who may never have found it, and then keep them here with all of the content we have already.

I don’t know if we’ve hit our first big ceiling. Maybe 2018 has more in store for us than I realize right now.

Steve D