It was a hot May on our website.
With one day left to go, we had 11,587 hits (as of 9:12 p.m. Monday, May 30). Just incredible! The next night, as as midnight neared on the East Coast, where the server is, we ended May with 11,967 hits!
We finished first for May in the monthly Got News? Get Clicks contest on our website network, hsj.org. We'll receive $250.00 for this achievement!
The most I ever recall getting before this month was close to 5,000 hits.
It goes to show the rule of websites: The more often you update the more hits you get!
Last May I created awards to recognize things we (actually you all) were doing (and still are doing) online. As I was working on the awards last Saturday (May 28) I recalled the majority of our hits last year came from blogs. This year we had just two blogs in the top 20 of hits.
And as Saturday afternoon moved into evening and I saw some stories overtaking and passing others, I decided to wait until early Monday to make the top 20 certificates. So, shortly after 7 a.m. Monday, when I arrived at school, I created the certificates. No doubt if we looked at hits next week, we'd have different results.
Things you can do to help yourselves get hits:
--Publicize your work on your personal Facebook or other social network site.
--Demand that I give you the "Twitter phone" and send a tweet to followers of the paper.
--Send Tweets to your own Twitter account.
--If your personal website or blog site allows you to create widgets, go to your personal FB, Twitter or other site and get the coding to put into your widget. In other words, connect them to each other! (Outside of school, go to The MT's site and see the widgets for Twitter and Facebook! (And also the weather and opinion poll are widgets.)
--If you have a personal website or blog site, link your stories from The MT's site to yours.
--Urge friends to subscribe to your rss feed. (rss = really simple syndication)
The latter is a nifty little device (I guess that's what it is called.) Notice the orange squares or rectangles with the speaker-like drawing inside? That enables one to subscribe to a particular rss feed, and whenever the feed publishes, subscribers receive a notice.
Get people to subscribe to your feed. (If you go to VMT's website you'll see rss feeds everywhere!
Notice near the top of The MT's site, and at the top of your blog, there are rss feeds for computers and mobile devices.
Pretty nifty, eh?
As the old-school DJs used to say, "keep the hits coming!"