10,000 Hits!

I'm excited because, at 8:43 this morning, I got my 10,000th visitor since I added Sitemeter to I Love Beer back on September 6, 2006. I never expected it would happen this fast, because a year ago I was lucky to get 20 visitors a day. But traffic here has exploded in the past few months, and I now average 70 per day. It's also pretty cool because I'm rapidly gaining on my wife, who added her Sitemeter three days after me but quickly got way ahead of me and reached 10,000 last month. In her favor, though, her hits mostly derive from actual fans/readers, whereas the bulk of mine come from Google searches. (But to those of you who are regular readers — glad you're enjoying it!)

I'm not quite certain what has driven my hits up, but the growth has been crazy. Perhaps as other bloggers have gradually linked up to me, it's having a cumulative effect. Until May, I consistently averaged around 500 visitors per month, but then it went steadily went up: June 742, July 948, August 1,196, September 1,423. Now we're barely past mid-October, and I already have 1,080. What a snowball!

A theory: I bet after October, when people are no longer doing searches on the phrase "Oktoberfest," the hits will dip back down.

It's been fun so far!

(UPDATE: And it continues: Yesterday [Oct. 18], I had 103 hits. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've topped 100 in a single day.)