Blog for Iowa’s Traffic Explodes in Month of June



Welcome New Bloggers!



Democracy
for Iowa would like to welcome all our new bloggers to Blog for
Iowa.  Today is actually the three-month anniversary of Blog for
Iowa, as we put up the first post on April 1 and have been going strong
every since.  With an average of three posts per day, we have
published nearly 300 articles in the last three months.  There is
a great search feature on the left sidebar of Blog for Iowa that you can use to search for any subject or person ever mentioned on Blog for Iowa.



The
traffic on Blog for Iowa has just exploded in the last month. 
This, I believe, is due to always keeping something fresh at the top
for people to read.  As DFIA Environmentalist Molly Regan said,
“Blog for Iowa is our own personal newspaper.”  Our traffic is
measured not by hits, but by “distinct hosts served,” which means the
number of individual computers that hit our site per day.  In
April, our first month, we averaged 94 per day; in May, we averaged 139
per day.  But in the last week in June, we averaged 481 per
day.  Our highest day ever served 795 distinct hosts on June 29,
with a whopping 1,783 page views in that one day.



One
thing I’ve learned in the last three months is that fresh materials
keep people coming back, and lack of fresh materials quickly kill a
website.  Take the IDP website,
for example.  They finally posted some fresh material on their
blog a couple of days ago, but before that, they hadn’t posted since
May 17th!  Shocking, especially in a year when we are trying to
create a vibrant, active Democratic party!  The other big reason
why Blog for Iowa has taken off so quickly is because we have a devoted
group of dedicated Iowa Dean supporters who take every opportunity to
pass out Blog for Iowa buttons and stickers (which you can order and/or
download on the right sidebar of Blog for Iowa).  They’ve buttoned
and stickered folks at the district and state conventions, at Gay Pride
events around Iowa, at Meet Ups, and just about anywhere else they can
think of.



You may
not realize this, but when the Dean campaign left Iowa – rather
abruptly, as you know – they took their lists, email and otherwise,
with them.  The Iowa Dean supporters were then expected to rally
around Gov. Dean’s new organization, Democracy for America,
and provide on-the-ground support for the goals of the new DFA. 
So, Dr. Alta Price, MD, of Bettendorf, and I decided to set up Blog for
Iowa so that our people would be able to find each other.  You
know what they say about Iowa:  If you build it, they will come.



And it
has been working pretty well, I’d say.  In the last three months
of running Blog for Iowa, I’ve only made a fool of myself publicly five
or six times.  But I always leave it up on the site for people to
see – a victory of idiocy over ego, I suppose, or maybe it’s just good
for a laugh.  One thing I regret is that after the district
conventions, we glossed over what had really happened in an attempt to
“be polite and get along.”  I think that hurt us in some ways
because our people needed a place to come where they could vent and
hear what others had experienced.  I didn’t make that same mistake
this time with the state convention, and I think I was proven right as
our webstats indicate that our state convention reports, Screw Thy Neighbor in the Name of Party Unity, and Citizen Whip-founder Dave Inbody’s Our State Convention, were two of the most-read articles to date.



If you haven’t yet, please register to receive our emails by joining Democracy for Iowa
today.  I promise we won’t bombard you with updates.  That is
what we use Blog for Iowa for.  And if you have any questions or
want to locate someone in your area, please write me at blog@democracyforiowa.com.



And
don’t miss our great slate of progressive Iowa candidates listed on the
right sidebar of Blog for Iowa.  We’ll be adding several more
names in a day or two.  They need your help!



Thank you.



Linda Thieman, Storm Lake