200 Hits Per Day--But Virtually No Feedback

My harrymagnet.com site went live on October 25, 2009. From November 8 until yesterday (Dec 3), I’ve averaged 209 hits / day, over a 26 day period. This is measured by Awstats, a program that processes server logs, and that strips out hits from robots. I’ve been doing Google Advertising, and many of the hits are coming from this advertising (both from searches and content sites), but 44% of the hits (in November) came from direct address/bookmark/link in email. The hits are coming from all over the world, although the vast majority are from the U.S. The top 10 countries in hit count in November are as follows:

United States      1900
India                    436
Great Britain        352
Canada                344
Australia              284
Romania              216
Philippines           160
China                    98
South Africa          77
Russian Federation 75

I’ve only gotten one piece of feedback, a message in a bipolar discussion forum. As to why I haven’t gotten more feedback, I have no idea. Any guess would be speculative, so I won’t even try.

I didn’t know what the response would be when I went live with the harrymagnet.com website. I expected that if I got a lot of hits, that I would get some feedback. Another real possibility was that I would get few hits, and no feedback. The combination of 200 hits per day and virtually no feedback was probably the least likely possibility in my mind.

In my Triumph of Dullness blog post, I say how it’s difficult to start from scratch. There is very little encouragement in our society for truly creative ideas. There are no movements, no role models, no mentors, and no heroes. It is extremely difficult to generate interest in a crazy idea like human magnetoreception, especially when I’m unknown and have no credentials. It would have been hard in more creative past eras, but I would have had a better chance of finding a mentor or advocate. The fact that my website has been generating hits is encouraging, since it implies that some people are interested in finding out more about my ideas.

I think that if my website continues to generate 200 or more hits per day, then it’s likely that at some point, people will start talking about it. The more hits, the more people who are introduced to my ideas, the better chance that a few people will mention it in blogs, forums, Facebook, or other online media. Some feedback may be negative, and some positive, but both types of feedback will be a means to generate badly needed online “buzz.”