150000 views and counting!

My blog has finally reached 150000 views!

I reached 100000 views in April of 2021 and wrote 100000 views and counting! on April 30th.

It took this blog 8 years and 2 months to hit the 150000 views mile stone, and it hasn’t been easy.

Reaching 150000 views

Like many bloggers, I started out with a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of ideas. Some ideas worked and a lot of enthusiasm has wafted away like smoke in a stiff breeze.

Some people have the talent for writing and coming up with good ideas. Some people are great at SEO, which means getting eyeballs and clicks on their posts.

I see bloggers posting everyday. I see bloggers posting consistently every week or two weeks.

It takes both talent and enthusiasm to write with some consistency in terms of quality and frequency over eight years. Even for a single year.

The Long way to 150000 views

The folks who write well and post consistently are able to build a large following which generally translates to a high volume of views.

I tried blogging once a week, twice a month and once in a while. Blogging twice a week was a lot of work and didn’t really grow my blog the way you might think it would.

Blogging once in a while has lead to a slow and steady growth in people checking out what I write.

Blogging when I have something to say seems more genuine, and that’s what I look for in a blog.

As my enthusiasm waned over the years, I found it harder to maintain my enthusiasm for a topic as I wrote about it.

Most blog posts take a few hours to write. Some have many revisions. Often I would find that after an hour, I just didn’t feel it anymore. The post I was writing was not worth the effort.

My low volume of output made the road to 150,000 views that much longer.

Reaching 150000 views was challenging

In the early years I was learning how to blog and was finding my voice. The newness and the learning experience kept me engaged as much as the writing did.

The past 18 months have been right in the middle of the COVID-19 epidemic.

My blog is focused on running and when races were cancelled my source of material dried up.

I did write about a few virtual races. They’re not the same as in person races but they were convenient and I learned to enjoy running in my area.

But I only wrote about a few of them. Without going somewhere and spending time with other runners, a virtual race feels just like another training run.

In addition to my source of topics drying up, I dealt with many of the same challenges you did.

Between biology and politics, the past two years have been a grind.

Does anyone know what day it is? Does anyone really care?

Well, now that we are back to the office, the day of the week has become important again and has added some much needed structure to our lives.

I found it hard to focus. As I mentioned above, my enthusiasm for a post often waned before I could hit the Publish button.

When I found something to write about, it often felt trivial compared to what was going on in the world.

And while I wasn’t clinically depressed, I was depressed like everyone else.

Every day the numbers kept going up. Stories about hospitals bringing in refrigerator trailers to hold the bodies. And then there was all the turmoil when we finally got two vaccines.

About two years ago I also injured my Achilles. This was about six months into COVID. Just when I really needed regular running to keep my head on strait.

That cut back on my training and recreational running.

My recovery has been an up and down road. And I can’t say that my attitude was always rosy.

And with people dyeing by the thousands every day, I couldn’t bring myself to write about my own trivial aches and pains.

Reaching 150000 in spite of my self

Over the past few years several of my posts have been generating more than half of my traffic.

What Distance can me child run went from 13,476 total views in 2021 to 39,672 total views as of October 28th, 2022. That’s almost triple in one year.

With people spending more time at home, working from home and having fewer activities for their kids, interest in this post just took off.

It was nice to see the click throughs to the resources I provided to help parents figure out how far their child can run at any age.

No one has ever commented that this really helped them out, but I have to believe that a few people book marked those other sites and went for a run with their child.

The next most popular post is New England Marathons Fall 2021 or 2022 now. That post went from 18,079 to 26,430 in one year.

Those two perennial posts did most of the heavy lifting to get me from 100,000 to 150,000 views.

Reaching for 200000 Views

With in person running and my ability to run coming back, achieving the next milestone should not take 18 months.

We all know that running improves your attitude and makes you more energetic.

I’m also looking to run the 2023 Boston Marathon. That journey will give me plenty to write about.

As the malaise of COVID-19 dissipates (hopefully), my energy and enthusiasm returns and interesting stories present themselves, you should be hearing from me more frequently.

Here’s to the next 50,000 views and the many good stories everyone will enjoy to help me get there.

Run well my Friends,

Andy