It’s been almost six months now that I started this blog, and the resonance is better than I would have dreamed back then.

The numbers

In the just over 25 weeks since I started this blog, I have published 34 posts, not including meta posts like this one and a first month restrospective. At the start, I wrote two posts per week to get some content quickly and then scaled back to one post of about 1000 words per week, which I have found a sustainable amount.

In these six months I got a total of just over 100.000 visitors and just shy of 130.000 page views. I have not found many numbers for comparison, but it seems this blog is not doing too bad.

The number of visitors per post varied greatly. Some posts still have less than 600 visitors even after several weeks, others got well over 1000 on the first day. Three of them went through the roof (by my standards) and got about 10.000 visitors and more on the first two days: In March, I published a post about Clean Code vs. Performance which has about 23.000 views by now. This month I landed two hits with “C++ Is Not Java”, and “The State of C++”. The three posts together got about half of my total visitors.

Getting Visitors

I do not too much to get visitors to the blog. I have a plugin installed that tweets about each new post and posts a link to in on Xing, the German counterpart to LinkedIn. I posted a link to one or two of the posts on Reddit, and that’s about it.

Most of my traffic I owe to readers who put my posts on isocpp.org’s blog, on Reddit, or on Twitter and to a handful of other sites like meetingcpp.com’s weekly blogroll. Maybe I could and should do a bit more to promote this blog, but I “didn’t get around to do it” – meaning I was a lazy sod.

Did it work out?

So, does a blog boost your career? Did mine? I can not be sure, but I like to think it did. Since I started the blog, I got increasingly more often contacted by recruiters than before. I followed up one of those contacts and it led to a very nice opportunity, so I am switching jobs in a few weeks.

Of course, that does not mean I will stop blogging. My career is not over, nor is my backlog of topics empty. I have yet no idea where this thing is heading, but maybe one day I’ll be able to live off my website and retire like John. I’d like that 😉