“Only” 365 people visited my website

Hello lovely WAers. Happy Friday!

I did something today that I haven't done for a while. I opened Google Analytics.

I've been busy with lots of other things recently, so I haven't been paying anywhere near as much attention to my websites as I should. In fact, I haven't actively promoted any of them for over 3 months. So I wasn't expecting very much.

Then I saw this for my Drama Teachers site:

365 active users in the last 28 days.

Now, in internet terms and big business, 365 doesn't sound terribly exciting. We're surrounded by people talking about thousands of visitors, hundreds of thousands of followers and videos with millions of views.

So it would be very easy to look at 365 and think: Is that all?

But then I thought about it differently, and I'd encourage you to look at your own websites in the same way. Now, being a Drama Teacher, I find imagining things particularly easy, but really...

Imagine 365 actual people

Forget Google Analytics for a moment and imagine I hired a hall and invited everyone who had visited my little Drama teaching website during the last 28 days to come along.

365 people would turn up.

I'd need quite a big hall! Certainly more than my local village community centre!

And these aren't people I've personally invited - the vast majority don't know me. In fact, Analytics tells me that 361 of those 365 were new users.

They came because they were looking for something, and it wasn't my cooking I can tell you. But one of my most visited articles during that period was about physical theatre exercises. That page alone had 53 active users.

Again, 53 doesn't sound enormous in internet terms but put 53 people into a classroom because they want to hear what you have to say about teaching physical theatre, and suddenly it feels rather different.

That's two decent-sized classes of people.

Perhaps we're measuring the wrong thing

It made me wonder whether the internet has slightly distorted our idea of what constitutes success. We seem to be always looking at numbers instead of people.

• 10 visitors
• 50 users
• 100 clicks
• 365 active users

They're tiny numbers on a screen.

But behind almost every one of those numbers is an actual human being who clicked something because, for whatever reason, they thought it might contain something useful. I realise there are a lot of 'bots' out there than can skew things so we do need to be careful, but still - somewhere, people are still looking.

And that brings me to something else I've been thinking about.

Content still matters

There is an absolutely staggering amount of content being published online now. And yes, AI has made it possible to produce enormous quantities of it very quickly. But is it all relevant? Does it all answer a need for the user, or a want to produce 'something' from the perspective of the creator?

I say that with some amusement because my long-suffering AI assistant, who we all know and love as Sparky, is involved in virtually everything I do these days. 😂 (That emoji is for your Sparky).

I'm certainly not anti-AI. But I do think there's a difference between using AI as a tool to help you create something worthwhile and simply filling a website with generic content because you can.

The articles that consistently attract visitors to my Drama site aren't there simply because I needed another keyword or talking generically about a subject. (I have done that on my other sites sometimes and paid the price!) The Drama Teacher articles contain things that Drama teachers can actually use.

They're often downloadable and include:

• Exercises
• Drama techniques
• Warm-ups
• Ideas for teaching physical theatre
• Practical explanations of things such as freeze frames
• Resources written from my own perspective as somebody who actually understands the subject and has taught it for years

And perhaps that's why people are still finding them even when I'm not actively promoting the site.

Maybe useful content has a longer life than we realise

That's the bit that encouraged me today. I've spent months concentrating on other projects and probably, helpfully, I've hardly looked at Analytics. I certainly haven't been sitting there every day driving people towards the site or hit 'refresh' to see if another spider has wandered in from the cold!

Yet somewhere out there, at least a few Drama Teachers are searching for drama-related things.

And miraculously, Google is sending some of them my way. They arrive, read, and hopefully they leave with something that helps them.

Is 365 visitors going to make me rich?

No. 😂😂😂😂😂😂 (Insane laughter from many of you, I'm sure!)

But that's not really the point. I've realised an important lesson today which is:

This site is still working when I'm not looking at it.

The content I created months ago is still being discovered. And 365 real people walked through the virtual door in 28 days. I think that's actually rather lovely. And I'm not bragging about my site, but I'd like to emphasise the lesson here so I'm going to repeat it slighly differently.

Building a business online can still work for you when you're not looking at it.

So if you look at your Analytics today and feel disappointed because your numbers aren't enormous, try something different. Stop thinking of them as users and

Imagine them as people.

Put them all in a room.

Then ask yourself:

If this many real people turned up to hear what I had to say, would I really think nobody was listening?

You might find the number suddenly looks rather different.

Gail
(and Sparky, who would like it formally recorded that he does not produce AI slop 😂)