I've had a blog since 2009 (https://www.thenaterhood.com/blog). My personal network (classmates at the time) were, and still are, my biggest officially subscribed base as far as what I'm able to track with minimal effort.
I've been posting much more regularly this year - once a week, versus periodically, as a way to vent some of my frustration with the current state of affairs. Otherwise, I've been doing pretty much the same - post it then tweet it, Facebook it, and LinkedIn it. Being regular I've seen has drawn more attention than anything in the past. With a once a week post, I have more re-shares and more clicks than I have before. Part of it may also be that I'm doing less of just spouting things into posts, but doing a lot of research and linking out to my sources.
What's interesting about having an audience though, is that they seem to be harder to track these days. Most of my personal network uses adblock, ghostery, or other similar extensions to stay off the radar, so their visits don't show up. I know they're happening since I use trackable links when I share and the number of clicks is far and away higher than the number of visits Google Analytics logs. It also seems people are less likely to give out an email address or subscribe to a blog feed since it pops up on social media. I used to get the periodic new email subscriber, but I haven't had a new signup in years now.
Even for myself, I don't "subscribe" to blogs anymore. I hate seeing an unread count and all that which most feed readers provide because it feels too much like an inbox. Give me a list of headlines and let me decide what I'm going to read. In light of that, I periodically check in with blogs I read by directly visiting the site.
> they seem to be harder to track these days. Most of my personal network uses adblock, ghostery, or other similar extensions to stay off the radar, so their visits don't show up
You could still track some of them using server logs, and a desktop log analysis tool (like Web Log Storming [1]). As long as they're downloading the HTML, their access will have to show up in the server log. Not as convenient as logging into Google Analytics, but with the amount of spamming of GA lately, I've been thinking more about going back to old desktop tools to solve some of my metrics questions.
True. I'm running off Gitlab pages right now so I don't control the webserver, although I could drop a tracking pixel in that loads off a server I do control.
It does make it a little harder to determine new vs returning visitors though. Not impossible, but harder. To me, knowing that is more important because that's how you know you have an audience, versus just a bunch of people visiting from HackerNews, for example.
I've been posting much more regularly this year - once a week, versus periodically, as a way to vent some of my frustration with the current state of affairs. Otherwise, I've been doing pretty much the same - post it then tweet it, Facebook it, and LinkedIn it. Being regular I've seen has drawn more attention than anything in the past. With a once a week post, I have more re-shares and more clicks than I have before. Part of it may also be that I'm doing less of just spouting things into posts, but doing a lot of research and linking out to my sources.
What's interesting about having an audience though, is that they seem to be harder to track these days. Most of my personal network uses adblock, ghostery, or other similar extensions to stay off the radar, so their visits don't show up. I know they're happening since I use trackable links when I share and the number of clicks is far and away higher than the number of visits Google Analytics logs. It also seems people are less likely to give out an email address or subscribe to a blog feed since it pops up on social media. I used to get the periodic new email subscriber, but I haven't had a new signup in years now.
Even for myself, I don't "subscribe" to blogs anymore. I hate seeing an unread count and all that which most feed readers provide because it feels too much like an inbox. Give me a list of headlines and let me decide what I'm going to read. In light of that, I periodically check in with blogs I read by directly visiting the site.