July 17, 2006
Master Naturalist Blog Passes 10,000 visits!
While doing some housekeeping, we just noticed that sometime in the month of June, our 25th month of operations, our blog received its 10,000th recorded visit! Our counter wasn't started until the blog was a couple months old, though, so if we try to count from day one, several different different methods suggest that we probably passed absolute 10K in about March 2006.
This total included returning visits as well as new or unique visits. ( We exclude our own visits.) We average from
7 to 10 visits a day. About 2 are folks who have been to the site before. But sometimes our articles are so timely, or the topics so popular, that our visitor count skyrockets into the 30's and 40's per day. Examples are the Brin Fire, anything on Condors, and horned lizards(!), or auroras in AZ. Writers for magazines like Mountain Living have spent hours at our site, mining for ideas. US representatives and senators, and even the Congressional Research Office and the US Senate Sargeant at Arms (?) have visited our site. Someone from the AZ Supreme Court has been a regular visitor for almost two years. We have visitors from all corners of the globe looking on our blog for information about climate, about volunteer activities, and for pictures.
We get regular visitors from school districts all over the United States: Sometimes it is faculty, and sometimes it is a brief flood of students, apparently sharing a reference for some theme that we have touched upon. University faculty, internet consultants, and Extension Service webmasters have and do use our blog as a model (sometimes THE model) for a blog that works at communicating with its existing clientele... and with new "markets", or people not otherwise familiar with Extension Services.
Other organizations fitting the naturalist theme but lacking their own blog, or even web page, use our blog to get the word out for their activities, functions, schedules, and links.
All in all, we are providing a huge window of visibility for Extension Service outreach and education, even at a mere 7 or 10 visits per day. As our milestone shows, it adds up.
We have lost track of the number of crosslinks to our blog that have been made by other web sites, but it is likely several dozen now. A Google Search® on topics like "Naturalist", "Master Naturalist", or even "Arizona" will often bring up our blog on the first or second page, often we appear at number one or two! This is due largely to the frequency of updates (at least weekly), the variety of topics, our growing archives, and the number of links and crosslinks to our blog and to those topics.
We owe a lot the the support from the UofA Learning Technology Center(LTC), who offered to their support to us very early on. They recognized the potential for this very kind of success and the efficiency of delivery that it promises. They provide technical support, such that system and software problems are absolutely invisible to us, and reliability is so near to 100% (.999882, roughly) that we have been offline less than 2 hours in 25 months... and that was scheduled! The LTC provides this service at no direct cost to us, and with no restriction on the size or extent of our archives. It also reflects well on local Extension Service leaders who have supported this experiment, which originally looked like just another headache - er, project - to support.
Thanks to all our visitors, too. As we track visits, we see a small but perceptible growth in return visitors. We have also learned that weekends are dead, and visits of different catgories are seasonal. We get discovered by people looking for other things, like the hottest AZ temps, or photos of lizards. We also get people looking for "naturists", AKA nudists...
We want to serve Arizonans first, so we also track the percentage of "locals" (it's about 60 percent, and shows "seasonality") but we also love presenting ourselves to other states, countries, organizations, Extension Service programs, amd so forth. Thank you, and please keep checking on us!