One Man’s 500th Post

Have you ever been driving down the road and noticed that you were getting to one of those interesting mile markers on the odometer of your car? Like, you look down and it says 9,996 miles and you’re thinking, ‘Wow! I want to watch it roll over to 10,000.’ Then you get distracted doing something else and almost miss it…

Well, that’s what almost happened to me. I was so busy doing other things that I almost missed the fact that this very post is my 500th post!

It all started on July 23, 2006 with The Inaugural Post. Back then One Man’s Blog was just a dream I had to do something I loved, and share useful information with others. At the time, most of my friends and family didn’t really even know what a blog was.

Back at the beginning I sent an e-mail to 20 of my closest friends and family letting them know I was starting this blog and asking for their support by subscribing and at least occasionally reading my articles. I really owe a lot to those of you who’ve been with me from the beginning, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

The first three months were the roughest. Back then I didn’t really have a rhythm, I wasn’t sure how often I should post, and I hadn’t yet developed my own style. The whole process was uncomfortable and that was combined with the fact that on any given day only a small number of people actually read my articles.

Still, as most of you know by now, I was determined to stick with it and I continued to post new articles every day, all the while becoming more comfortable and formulating a posting rhythm and style of my own.

After the third month interesting things began to happen. My subscriber count began growing. By the fourth month it had doubled, and by the sixth it had more than doubled again. During this time the blog went from averaging in the tens of readers each day to the hundreds!

Here we are almost exactly 9 months later and it looks like I’ve averaged about 1.85 posts per day since inception. Now there are on average almost 200 “tracked” subscribers via Feedburner and hundreds more that don’t show up there. In addition, there are now hundreds of links to One Man’s Blog from all over the Internet and Google and the other search engines send hundreds of visitors each day to all of the different posts from the past.

During the last 30 days the blog has averaged 3,380 unique visitors per day (according to Feedburner), or one new visitor every 26 seconds. And to be perfectly honest Feedburner isn’t even tracking all of the visitors!

So, all I can say is THANK YOU to all of you who’ve supported my efforts so far. You folks are the reason I keep doing this, and I’ll do my best to keep improving!