Writing Stuff and Statistics

I recently joined Insomniac as a writer, an online publication spearheaded by students from my faculty, FASS. I joined for two reasons - I needed some CCA to speak of, and I like to write.

Since then, I've written two articles: "How to Survive a Date with an Arts Student" and "How to Survive Recess Week", which were published on the Insomniac website.

Both articles (and probably all my future articles) are not serious articles - they do not really provide genuine dating tips (well, besides a few at the end) or anything. They are light-hearted articles in which I infuse my own brand of wit and sarcasm and satire and whatever else I have.

What took me by surprise was how much of an impact they had. I wouldn't go so far as to say they were 'popular', that just seems to be some sort of boast, but perhaps I could just present the stats:

For All-Time stats (since the site's inception about a month ago), 'How to Survive a Date with an Arts Student' has had 502 unique views (refreshing doesn't affect it), while the main page of Insomniac (i.e. Home Page) only has 408 unique views.

I'm not even sure how this happened, my guess is that people direct linked the article and didn't visit the main page after reading it.

This sounds good, but 502 was over a period of 1-2 weeks, so it's not exactly that amazing or anything. What blew me away was the stats for my latest article 'How to Survive Recess Week':

On the day it was published, in just one day, it received 250 unique views (and another 109 today), and thus in the Past 7 Days stats, has eclipsed the main page as well, 359 > 238

I am really humbled by these stats, and how well-received the two entries were (First has 22 Facebook shares, second has 14 Facebook shares). The support from friends was also quite heartwarming. Thanks guys! (and girls!)

I would consider this a small 'success', and just like Jeremy Lin, I have to remember to stay humble and credit all success to God. That dude is really inspiring man, but a blog about him (or rather why and how he inspired me) would take another whole entry altogether.

Hope that my future articles would be as well-received as these two!

And I was just wondering too, as I also blogged on realfass in the past (haven't written an entry for almost a year), what would the viewership be like there? I went to check the stats:

Apart from the anomaly of '35 + 16 = disaster' (which was so widely viewed because it was about S.Lim and also referenced by certain other popular bloggers) and 'CORS bidding for dummies' (which is a repeated view), it would seem the average pageviews of each entry is about 500-600ish. (After one year)

And my first article on Insomniac has already hit 500 in 2 weeks.

Wow.

I think a lot of it came down to the publicizing as well - I didn't publicize on Facebook for the realfass articles, but for Insomniac I did, and for the 2nd article even Szehong and some other friends help to spread it (thus the meteoric rise in stats)
I guess some publicity goes a long way.

I know some of you have been asking for MLM Part 2, and I am working on that, trust me :) It just takes time to write a long entry like that, y'know? Plus I have to study and all. It should be up by this week!
Alright time to grab dinner w the gf. bye!