VTOR reaches 10,000 unique visitors

Back in March 2006, I wrote that VTOR had reached it’s first 1,000 unique visitors. Yesterday, this website passed 10,000 unique visitors. This information is open to the public, you can follow along with the traffic stats by looking at the third party Site Meter counter on the bottom of each page. Click to visit the stats program.

2006 - using free hosting

2007 as of 1/1714/2007 - our own domain and hosting (Update 7:55am PST: I screwed up the “as of” date, it should actually be as of 1/14/2007, not 1/17 which isn’t even here yet — doh!)

It is really paying off getting on our own domain and server as already evidenced by visitors and record page views this month, and we’re just a little over half-way through the month.

Why?
Some might wonder why we are sharing these stats. No, it’s not to stroke our egos. I mean, really, there are blogs out there with more impressive stats after a year. Of course, everybody has to start somewhere, right? Why not share how we’re doing? It’s not easy building blog traffic (or traffic to your virtual business or location), and there are a lot of folks who give up building too soon. This open, third party reported record of our group’s progress could be helpful for others in those dark days when it seems like a site isn’t going to grow any more. Personally, I think too many bloggers get a little momentum and when things start to turn (and they always turn at some point or another) like they did for us in the summer 2006, they give up. If this fits anybody reading with their own blog, then do what we did: rally, regroup and march on.

In a couple weeks this site will pass the one year mark. From my perspective, at least, we’ve only just begun this blogging journey. I think unless you are some kind of celebrity or have help from another source, it takes a good 3-5 years to really get a blog rocking. The topic of this blog which is virtual worlds is wide open enough, and yet still not completely wide open, that we should have plenty of topics to write about in the coming days, months and years.

Next stop? 100,000 and then onto the first million. Little steps lead to bigger ones. Thank you for boarding the rocket ship, exploring and experiencing along with us. We’ll continue to keep the door open so that others can join our mission to cover virtual worlds within and beyond the imagination.