2013 was my second year in blogging. I published 40 posts in 2013 (for a total of 72), and my cumulative site views were just a few shy of a 21,000 for the year. I only recieved 7,200 site views in 2012, so the blog has seen a fair bit of growth. The below chart aggregates the site views per month since the beginning (in December 2011) until December 2013. December has been a bit of a dip with only around an average of 60 views per day, but I was up to an average of 78 and 75 views per day in October and November respectively.

The large uptick in March was due to the Junk Charts Challenge being mentioned by Kaiser Fung. I got over 500 site views that day, and have totalled 765 referrals from the JunkCharts domain. This is pretty similar to the bursty behavior I noted on the CV blog, and that one good tweet or mention by a prominent figure will boost visibility by a large margin.

Most of the regular traffic though comes from generic internet searches, mainly for SPSS related material. A few of my earlier posts of Comparing continuous distributions of unequal size groups in SPSS (2,468 total views), Hacking the default SPSS chart template (2,237), and Avoid Dynamite Plots! Visualizing dot plots with super-imposed confidence intervals in SPSS and R (1,542) are some of my most popular posts. The Junk Charts Challenge post has a total of 1,804 views, but it seems to me that it was more of a flood initially and then a trickle as oppossed to the steady views the other posts bring.

Last year I said I would blog about a few topics and failed to write a post about any of them, so I won’t do that again this year. I will however state that I am currently on the job market, as I recently defended my prospectus. If you are aware of a job opportunity you think I would be interested in, or would like to talk to me about a consulting project feel free to send me an email (you can see my CV for my qualifications and brief discussion of past and current consulting services I have provided).

Some sites give advice about maintaining a blog and attracting visitors (such as writing posts so often). My advice is to write quality material, and the rest is just icing on the cake. Hopefully I have more cake for you in the near future.