I’m extremely happy to say that Self Taught Japanese has reached it’s 100th post! A big thanks to everyone who has liked, followed, commented, or re-blogged my posts.
First, I’ll give in to my penchant of analyzing blog statistics and talk about how they have changed for this blog between it’s 50th post and now.
My first post was Dec 9, which means that I wrote 100 posts in a little under a month. This works out to a little under one a day, which is a pretty quick pace. I had some spans of several days where I didn’t post, but I tried to have a handful of posts written in advance and ready to roll out so I could keep a good stream going.
As for likes – WordPress doesn’t seem to show the total number of likes anywhere (except when you hit round numbers like 50 or 100 which I am past), but judging from the number of email notifications I received I have around 345. I had around 125 at my 50th post so my rate getting likes has gone up around 75%.
Followers, which I value above likes, are now at around 152, compared to 61 after 50 posts. This rate has gone up 49% ( (150-61) / 61) = 1.49).
Total views is around 2500, but that is abnormally high since I advertised this blog on a certain popular message board, giving me a record of 420 hits in a single day, and a few more days of higher-than-average views until things died down. If we roughly assume 1000 of those came from that advertising, that leaves 1500, which shows a rate of about double when compared to my first 50 posts, where I got around 500 views.
WordPress gives an exaggerated number of comments since their figure apparently include spam comments (which are normally filtered), but email notifications says about ~32 non-spam comments. Comparing to 12 comments from my first 50 posts, there is around a 66% increase in comments per post.
All these trends are very promising and if things continue growing at this rate I could end up with an exponential curve. I’ll suppress my desire to calculate how many followers I’d have if I continue the rest of the year like this.
In terms of content, I had less posts on foreign language learning in general (study techniques, etc.) and more about Japanese grammar and vocabulary. This was something originally I didn’t want to delve into too deeply because of a host of other resources online, but I decided to make posts on topics where I could use my experience to convey something unique. I have a lot more ideas running around in my head and hope to get them down on (virtual) paper in near future. As you can tell from the first part of this post, I also enjoy analyzing blog statistics and thinking about blogging in general so I hope to continue occasional posts on ‘meta-blogging’ as I call it.
My first poll was a great success, with over 100 responses and some interesting findings. I hope to put out another one in the next few weeks.
After writing 100 posts, I feel that honed my process of “inspiration->develop idea->write->edit” to be more efficient such that I can sometimes finish a post in under an hour. One thing I’m still struggling with, however, is understanding why some posts are popular (meaning they get more likes and result in more followers) and why some are duds. There is an aspect of randomness to this, but also an art to selecting ideas and designing posts that are informative and fun to read, and I hope to work on that more going forward.
Apart from this blog, I’ve been working on something new related to foreign language studying, and I hope to give a special announcement in the near future, so stay tuned!