400 – behind the Scenes

Welcome to Bleistift’s 400th blog post.

As this is kind of an anniversary post I want to give you a quick behind the scenes look. The last post like this was 1½ years ago. It was the 5 years Bleistift – behind the scenes post.

Visitors (actually sessions) in the last year, by country.
Visitors (actually sessions) in the last year, by country. Can you see the smudging? That’s why I don’t like soft leads.

Statistics

The countries where the visitors come from (measured by Google Analytics) has hardly changed. Spain is not as strong anymore, but Australia is much stronger now.

Last time I looked at visitors, this time I want to look at page views (measured by WordPress). Bleistift gets around 6,000 – 9,000 page views a month. I am not sure how many of these are real, as I get around 20 spam comments a day – so I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of pageviews be real humans is a lot less per month. I guess you can deduct 1,000 for spam bots etc.

Sites that send most visitors to Bleistift are in a similar order than what you have seen last time, but Lexikaliker is now the strongest site, followed by Pencil Revolution and The Pen Addict – with all three sites sending nearly the same number of visitors to Bleistift – the difference is ~5%.

 

Size

How does this compare? Well I think it is safe to say that Bleistift is a tiny blog, based on the fact that in comparison the numbers are tiny and that Bleistift isn’t on the radar of many people in the stationery community, so you usually won’t find it on the list of pencil blogs, e.g. at The Well Appointed Desk, My Pencils Draw Worlds or on sites like Pennaquod.

The semi-professional blogs have huge numbers in comparison. Number 1 must be The Pen Addict, with over 1 million page views per month. Other geographically closer blogs from the UK, like Pens! Paper! Pencils! with more than 20 thousand page views per month are also several times Bleistift’s size.

 

Cost

Bleistift is an amateur blog, but nevertheless I am lucky enough to have received freebies for reviews in the past, mainly from The Pen Company, who have sent me four different mechanical pencils over the last years – in return for writing reviews of these pencils for their blog. They also gave me permission to post these reviews on my own blog as long as I use a special code in my post that will let search engines know that the review on their blog is the original and my blog post is the duplicate (This is common in Search Engine Optimisation). Well, keeping this in mind I have to say that value of the freebies I got (excluding swaps with friends) is even a bit higher than the cost of the web site [1]This cost is the pencil.land domain and a SSL certificate. I don’t include the web hosting itself as I had it since the 1990s, long before Bleistift..

 

The past and the future

In my opinion the stationery blogging landscape has changed a lot since I started. My impression is that stationery blogs used to be more about presenting (objective) information. Today most blogs seem to be more about expressing individual (subjective) opinions without much reference to where the second hand information, that is being presented came from. Obviously the number of stationery blogs is huge, so every reader will sample a different subset of posts and will see different patterns emerge in what they read… Your experience might be quite different to my subjective experience.

In terms of Bleistift’s posts I have again noticed that short blog posts are much more popular than long blog posts, measured by the number of comments. I think the reason is that every one is busy and there’s not much time for reading, so ‘fast food’ is more welcome. Some of my more work intense blog posts [2]like Pimp my Rotring rapid PRO 0.5Affordable pencils or Zebra DelGuard got hardly any comments, but short blog posts seem to be much more popular, so I might focus on shorter blog posts in the future. I haven’t decided yet.

 

Top 5

Before I finish. Here’s the Top 5 of Bleistift’s most popular blog posts. These older blog posts get visited again and again.

  1. Atoma vs. M by Staples’ Arc (Twice as popular as number 2 in this list)
  2. Sharpeners (Actually a page, not a blog post)
  3. Deli pencil sharpener 0635 (My favourite sharpener)
  4. KUM Masterpiece (That’s a surprise, I didn’t spent much effort on this blog post)
  5. The Kuru Toga – a disappointment (Bleistift’s very first blog post)

 

Thanks

Thanks for visiting Bleistift over the last 400 blog posts and hope to see you again (and again) for the next 400.

 

 

References

References
1 This cost is the pencil.land domain and a SSL certificate. I don’t include the web hosting itself as I had it since the 1990s, long before Bleistift.
2 like Pimp my Rotring rapid PRO 0.5Affordable pencils or Zebra DelGuard

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