July: Another record month

Note to self: Mock feminists more often.

That would seem to be the lesson of traffic statistics for July, when The Other McCain set a new monthly record with 45,143 visits (66,255 page views). This continues five months of phenomenal readership growth since I started blogging full-time in March (6,625 visits that first month). As of today, the daily average is over 3,000 visitors.

The big traffic surge came over the past weekend, after Dr. Helen and Instapundit linked my post mocking feminist bloggers who were whining about the "online glass ceiling." This prompted additional linkage by Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades HQ, Don Surber, Ed Driscoll, James Joyner, Vox Day, Rachel Lucas and others, including some angry feminist bloggers. In all, this drove about 17,000 hits in a three-day period (July 27-29). The daily visit count has stayed above 1,000 in the three days following that surge, with links from National Review Online, Conservative Grapevine, and Michelle Malkin.

As noted earlier, while peak traffic is always driven by links from biggies like Insty, Malkin, Ace, etc., the key to improving average traffic is to have "higher lows" -- residual traffic that keeps the Site Meter from plummeting to zero at times when there is no new linkage. There were only six days in July with less than 500 hits.

Of course, most of what's on the blog is politics, and as attention to the presidential campaign heats up during coming months, it is to be hoped that traffic will continue to increase. But that doesn't mean an end to celebrity babe-blogging.