January was a record-breaking month for me.  Not only did I welcome 64 new followers (about two per day) my total views for one month record was shattered.  My previous record was 6,927 views in September 2012.  Now January 2014 is the record to beat with 8,228 views, including 5,133 unique views.  It may be a while before I break my record again but I’m very happy that my traffic has been consistently high this month.  So which articles brought people to my blog?

1.  Why Girls Hate Game of Thrones—A Rebuttal

2.  An Apology to Self-Published Writers

3.  The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome

4.  The Mad Reviewer Reading and Reviewing Challenge 2014 Sign Up

5.  How to Read 100 Pages in an Hour

We have a new article on the top 5!  Thanks to more than a little bit of help with Twitter promotion from Mark Lee of The Masquerade Crew my article ‘An Apology to Self-Published Writers’ went from getting two views in the entire month of December to climbing to the #2 slot this month with 834 views.  That, my friends, is the power of promotion.  Even with help it couldn’t beat out my Game of Thrones article but I was very pleased with the results of the Twitter promotion.  It also helped that people like you, my readers, spread the word about my reading challenge so I got 45 people to sign up this year.  That’s double the number that signed up last year.

So which articles were my worst this month?

1.  Discussion: Posting Schedules

2.  Switched by Amanda Hocking

3.  Cleopatra Confesses by Carolyn Meyer

4.  A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

5.  Your Shameless Blogging Self-Promotion Thread

I’m not really too worried or annoyed at any of these appearing on my list of least popular articles.  They’re either outdated articles like the self-promotion thread and the discussion or they’re older books that aren’t really popular much anymore.  It’s not the end of the world because none of these have appeared on the bottom 5 list before and likely won’t for a while yet.

In January I had record-breaking stats, read some great new books and re-read several of my old favourites.  All in all, it was a pretty good month.  How was your January?