How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Numbers

The number on rule in blogging, I'm told, is this: don't get obsessed with numbers.  Everything I read about blogging - yes, I read blogs about blogging; don't judge me - says that focusing on your blog stats is counterproductive because it makes you lose sight of what your blog is truly about.  If you overthink the number of comment/hits you get per post/day, the metanarrative of your blog will flounder.

(True confession: I'm not sure I have a metanarrative.  I'm not even sure I know what a metanarrative is.)

When I started blogging a year ago, Google Analytics wasn't a feature on Blogger - and, honestly, even if it had been I don't think I would have realized what it could do.  Count the number of hits per day?  Tell me where traffic comes from?  Rank my posts in order of popularity?  Surely only God can do those things.

And then that little "stats" tab appeared on my dashboard, like manna falling from the sky in the wilderness.  (Or something.)  I was hooked.  I checked my stats every [expletive] day - sometimes several times a day.  And, yes, my blogging suffered for it; I was paralyzed by the thought that my writing wouldn't reach the number of people I thought it deserved to be read by.  Ignorance is bliss, eh?

I did eventually get over that phase, mostly helped by the wonderful people who follow Betsy Transatlantically.  I realized that I've got 45 devoted followers and that 150 hits a day is 150 more than I would get if I didn't blog and that, actually, I blog for me at the end of the day.  So I stopped stressing... for a while.

Then I had my giveaway, and I took a trip to crazytown again.  (Warning: most self-absorbed sentence ever blogged is about to be typed.)  I was devastated to only have seven entries.  Maybe I didn't do the giveaway right, it wasn't a tempting enough prize, maybe I didn't leave enough time or link in enough places - maybe all my readers were vacationing on some gloriously sun-drenched and beach that, because it was so secluded, didn't have internet available.  Who knows?  The point is that I literally had trouble sleeping because I was so concerned that - wait for it - nobody loved me.  (Yes, I really did just write that, and yes, I realize how pathetic it is.)

But you know how I snapped out of it?  It's ironic - that's how I roll - but I turned to my stats counter.  Google tells me that people from all over the world are reading this blog.

Check out all that green!  In fact, Google itself is directing searches from at least seven countries' Google search engines.  How [expletive] cool is that?  Okay, so maybe only one person in each of those countries reads this blog, but still!  Someone in Israel is reading my blog!  Someone in Italy is reading my blog!  (To each of you, I say shalom and ciao.)  I have reached at least two people - due, as they say in Italian - whom I would absolutely not have had access to if I hadn't started blogging.

And with that, I learned to stop worrying and love the numbers.

(I'd also like to admit that I'm obsessed with the fact that over a dozen people have found this blog because they Googled "elbow elbow wrist wrist."  I am now not only an authority on how to get by in London financially - though, really, I feel I owe you an apology if you got here because you searched for "cost of living in London 2011" - but also on the Queen Wave.  Score.)