The OB Rag blog just had its best day ever !

Graph shows daily "unique visitor" hits for OB Rag blog, from October 24, 2007, to April 14, 2009.

OCEAN BEACH,CA.  April 14th, 2009, turned out to be our best day ever – in terms of visits – since we began October 25, 2007.

We registered 660 “unique visitors” during the 24 hour period represented by April 14th.  We had been cruising at 350 to 500+ visitors a day for weeks, then it just took off.  (A “unique visitor” is a separate IP address.) During the same time, we had over 1100 page hits or “pageloads”- a whole helluva lot, but not the ‘best day’.

Of course, it helps if the mayor comes to your community and holds a press conference on an issue that is dear to your heart and that of your readers. Here, it was the library.

And it helps if you send out emails to hundreds of readers, announcing what the mayor said about the issue.

Of course it helps, if you have a supportive readership on your email list that responds to your messages.

It helps, too, to have a great archive of posts. We’ve been posting pretty much daily since those first days. That level of publishing builds up a depth of resources available to your surfing readers.

Yesterday beat our previous winning day – March 19th, 2008, the day of coast-to-coast anti-Iraq war demonstrations, which we blogged about from 7 am that day to midnight.

When the OB Rag blog started in late October 2007 – during the great fires – we were receiving about 50 visitor hits a day. This rate went on for months. We’ve now increased that daily rate by a 1000% – I just said that to make it sound impressive -.

But 500 to 600 readers a day is.  We’re amazed and all smiles at the support we’re getting.

And expect the blog to be expanding.  A whole bunch of new bloggers have just joined our initial circle of myself, Patty, Doug, Anna, and Lane. We’re joined now by Dave Gilbert, Jon Carr, Mary Mann, “Wireless” Mike, Gary Gilmore, and others who would rather remain somewhat anonymous like “PSD”.

We have friends who occasionally publish posts for us, like Gregg Robinson, Jon Christensen, a man named ‘Stu”, and Michael Steinberg, – then there’s Jeff Stone who takes photos for us.

We have our direct supporters, good friends who donate money or time or both, like Monty and Ann, Genie, Dickie, and Rich K.  And then there’s the good folks who buy T-shirts or old issues of the original OB Rag.

All these folks have made it possible to have this best day ever. From Patty and me – thank you so much for all your support.