I have noticed a trend with the visits you are making to my blog. When someone else advertises a bloggage lots more of you visit than on the other occasions. That’s what the chart above reveals. The significant peaks in views and visits coincide with the occasions when one of my bloggages was featured on the Baptist Times Daily News Sweep. This encourages those who are not normally bloggists on my site to have a look and see what sort of bloggerel I have generated on that day.

That is interesting in itself but what I also find interesting is that on the subsequent days the number of views and visits drops back to whatever is considered normal. Clearly those visitors did not feel sufficiently inspired to make return visits. Actually (and by way of making myself feel better) these statistics are slightly misleading because (bless you) over 130 of you receive my bloggages each day by e-mail and those stats would show up in the visitor stats because technically you have not visited.

Several reflections occurred to me as I considered the rollercoaster nature of the graph above.

• word-of-mouth and recommendation are much better ways of advertising than simply being there and waiting to be found.
• funny headlines and discussing relevant topics may well encourage people to take a look. However…
• …unless you develop a relationship with your visitors they may well not stay.
• in the pursuit of increasing the number of regular visitors it is easy to forget those who are already regular visitors and receiving from you.

Perhaps churches ought to learn these lessons too. And if we are unsure perhaps we should contrast it with how Jesus went about things.

Be blessed, be a blessing

Statistics joke:

Aunt Bessie loved to visit her nieces and nephews. However, she had relatives all over the country. The problem was that no matter how much she enjoyed seeing them, she hated flying. No matter how safe people told her it was, she was always worried that someone would have a bomb on the plane.

She read books about how safe it was and listened to the stewardess demonstrate all the safety features. But she still worried herself silly every time a visit was coming up.

Finally, the family decided that maybe if she saw the statistics she’d be convinced. So they sent her to a friend of the family who was an actuary. 

“Tell me,” she said suspiciously, “what are the chances that someone will have a bomb on a plane?” 

The actuary looked through his tables and said, “A very small chance. Maybe one in five hundred thousand.” 

She nodded, then thought for a moment. “So what are the odds of two people having a bomb on the same plane?” 

Again he went through his tables. 

“Extremely remote,” he said. “About one in a billion.” 

Aunt Bessie nodded and left his office. 

And from that day on, every time she flew, she took a bomb with her.