I love this beautiful town.
I’ve been writing and publishing posts at FREE WHITEWATER for over seven months’ time. My first post was on May 22nd, and I’ve written over two-hundred thirty posts since then. This website has photos, an email link, a calendar, a translation tool, and a searchable archive. (Videos of places in town — a much delayed feature — will begin soon. Really.)
I write all of my own copy.
I much appreciate readers who stop by, and I’d like to tell you about readership figures for this website in 2007.
(Quick note: When I write about readership figures, I am writing about actual, local readers, not inflated numbers that include automated visits by search engines, etc., or visits by people in foreign countries who almost certainly have no connection to Whitewater. People abroad are always welcome to visit — bienvenue! — but I am not including them when I refer to readership. These figures do not include people who revisit more than once each week. Throwing in revisits pushes the daily figures way up. Readership statistics that do not filter for automated visits or revisits are often much-inflated.)
When I started writing in May, I had no idea if anyone would visit the site. I thought that I might get a few, local readers per week. I would have been very happy if twenty unique, local people visited per week. To me, that would have been a huge number — imagine if even twenty people would read what you wrote each week? That’s a large number of people — you could fill a baseball diamond with that number. I would have considered myself fortunate with that many readers.
After my first four weeks, I had about fifty local readers a week. Many visited for a fair amount of time, and I was greatly surprised. Weekly unique readership kept climbing, in each succeeding month — to one-hundred, then later two-hundred, then a few hundred, and then several hundred. Local readership keeps growing at an impressive rate.
(One surprise is that, based on my stats and email, I have considerably fewer university readers than one might expect. The vast majority of my readers are not from the university. The upside is that the university can be a growth-market for FREE WHITEWATER, so to speak.)
I wrote a few emails over the period announcing the site, but I have no idea if they increased readership. People whom I had never contacted started to email to me with comments, favorable and unfavorable, and then I realized that word-of-mouth must have taken hold.
FREE WHITEWATER now has a weekly, unique local readership that’s well over half the size of the century-old Whitewater Register’s reported, paid weekly subscription number of 1,569. FREE WHITEWATER is neither a general-interest newspaper nor an online bulletin board — it’s a website of independent commentary. I didn’t expect this number of readers, and I am very fortunate. That’s not bad for only seven months’ time. Woo!
(Of course, no one really knows if all those paid subscribers of the Register are actually readers. Some might use their weekly issue for food preservation
or avian housekeeping, and some other subscribers might be illiterate drug addicts or lunatics. Who knows?)
I would have kept writing — with the same content and tone — if only one person read my website. I didn’t pander to make people happy, sugarcoat what I had to say, or veer from my opinions to increase readership. The best thing a blogger can do is to be true to his conscience. I think that it’s the best way to approach others.
Some people wrote and told me that if I changed my tone, my readership would increase. That wasn’t the right course to me — I wanted to write what I believed, the way I wanted to write. I really never thought that I’d be fortunate enough to have this many readers, but I wanted to write in a blogging style true to my convictions. If only a few people read what I wrote, I would have been happy. If even one person emailed now and then, I would have been amazed. This course has paid off.
Thanks very much to everyone who stops by to visit FREE WHITEWATER. I write based on my convictions, and I appreciate your readership. The world is a busy place, and I want to thank you for taking the time to visit this website, and to write to me. The email that I receive is always interesting, and in each message I learn something from what you’ve written. (Many messages are serious, some funny, and a few almost heart-breaking.)
There will be more posts ahead this week and through the weekend.
The new year will be even busier for FREE WHITEWATER than 2007 has been!
Best regards,
JOHN ADAMS