Many companies took yesterday off in observance of January 1st (Saturday), so today represents the first day back in the ‘normal saddle’ for much our readership. Welcome back! We’ve missed you! You’d be amazed at how much our traffic falls off over the holidays…and, conversely, how many new followers we picked up on Twitter during the holidays. (Link to SFN on Twitter)
We worked hard over the holiday to keep the blog pretty updated and we wanted to take this opportunity to ask that you help us make up for lost traffic today by spending a little extra time surfing entries and getting us some page views to start the year. Speaking of starting the year, I wanted to specifically draw your attention to this great post from BJD ushering out 2010 and bringing 2011 into view. It’s a good one to set the table for the year to come.
Lastly, I wanted to re-engage you with a challenge related to our growing message forum community accessible by clicking here. Like the blog, there were a lot of interesting topics over the holidays that will take a little time skimming and scanning and reading. 2010 was our first full year of having the forums and Google Analytics indicates that we crushed it with just short of 700,000 visits from over 127,000 unique visitors, with the average vist lasting an astounding six minutes and four seconds.
The point of this is simple – significantly more people are out there reading and ‘lurking’ than you would ever know if you chose to judge the forums’ impact solely on comments in an entry. So, we really wanted to encourage you to never hesitate to share news & links that you find interesting from around the internet and also chime in whenever you feel compelled. Our simple goal is to try to always have a front page of topics that are current of the last 24 hours in hopes of never seeing a ‘1 Day’ old designation for any front page.
