Post Author: Bill Pratt 

A late “Happy Thanksgiving!” and an early “Merry Christmas!” to everyone! I traveled to Orlando during Thanksgiving to watch my 13-year-old daughter play in a prestigious soccer tournament at Disney’s Wide World of Sports, so I’ve failed to produce any new content in a week. Sorry about that.

However, this time of year I like to re-post the top ten most viewed blog posts from the year. So, that will kick off on Monday and run through the end of the year. During that time, I will be writing a whole raft of new blog posts to be published in January and February.

As you can imagine, it is difficult to write three new posts a week with a full-time job, 2 teenage kids who play a lot sports, a wife that would like to spend time with me, and my local church service. I cherish this time of year to take a break and renew myself for the new year.

I hope you “re-enjoy” the top ten posts and, again, Merry Christmas! I truly hope your time with the Savior is remarkable this year.

God bless,

Bill

P.S. If you are having trouble thinking of a gift to give a loved one or friend, I would like to recommend KindCards.com. I am an investor in this company and am passionate about its mission. The site allows you to send another person a personalized message and cash voucher to spend on the charity of their choice. It’s a way for you to write a personal e-card to a loved one and then let them pick a charity from a huge database to donate money to. Check it out!

Post Author: Bill Pratt

For those of you who have followed the blog for a few years, you know that every December I re-run the top ten posts of the year. The top ten is solely determined by number of page views, so I am not picking out my personal favorites – just going by the numbers.

While the top ten is re-posting over the next few weeks, I will be writing new material which will start publishing in January.  It’s always possible that I will sneak a couple of new posts in before the end of the year, but I generally like to take a break this time of year.

I want to thank all of you again for subscribing to the blog, whether by email, Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feed. Our readership grew tremendously this year, mostly by word of mouth and links from other sites, and I’m grateful to all of you who have passed along Tough Questions Answered to your friends.

God bless all of you and don’t let Christmas stress you out!  After all, it’s the birth of our Savior we’re celebrating.  What a  wonderful time of year!

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Rarely do I comment on the readership of the blog, but for those of you who are regulars, I thought you might be interested to know what the numbers are.  After all, we’ve been at this for almost four years, and if we’re writing, but nobody is reading, what’s the point?!

There are a few statistics that are worth mentioning.  First, the blog, over the last 6 months, has averaged about 11,000 unique visitors per month.  That means that something like 11,000 different people are visiting the actual blog site each month.

Second, over the last 6 months, there have been an average of 23,000 page views per month.

About 75% of the blog site traffic is referred by search engines, where people type something into Google and they are referred to one of the blog pages.  These people typically read one blog post and then move on.  I am gratified that so many people come to the blog for an answer to a question they have, but what I’m even more interested in are the people who come back over and over again.

There are two metrics I track that I think are better indicators of how many people are loyal to the blog, who read it regularly.  These are the people I can count on to return post after post.

The first metric of this type is the number of people who subscribe to the RSS feed.  This number has been steadily growing year after year and now stands at about 400 subscribers.  If you are one of these 400 people, thank you so much for taking time to read the blog on your RSS reader.

The second metric that tracks loyal readers is the number of email subscribers.  Generally, if you subscribe to something by email, you find it valuable.  After all, it’s hitting your inbox 3 times a week, and you can opt out whenever you want.  The current email subscribers stand at 356.  They are the most loyal group of readers, in my estimation, and that is why I encourage anyone who regularly reads the blog to subscribe by email.  You are the group who is the most encouraging to me.

The blog also has hundreds of readers from Facebook and Twitter.  Every blog post is re-posted on Facebook and the title of every blog post is tweeted.  Thanks to @plsconvinceme and @JohnAnkerberg and several others who regularly retweet blog posts.

The blog readership grows by search engine traffic and, of course, other websites linking to it.  There are several websites who regularly link to posts, including apologetics315.com, thepoachedegg.net, winteryknight.wordpress.com, and godresources.org.  I am so grateful for each and every time these sites link to a Tough Questions Answered post.

We’ve come a long way, and our prayer is constantly that we are glorifying God by giving answers to seekers who have tough questions about Christianity.  If you think this blog is successful fulfilling its mission, then please tell your friends about the blog!  Send them the web address today.  May God bless all of you!

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Regular readers of the blog know that I often write blog post series with multiple parts that I publish in sequence.  The reason I do this is because I want to keep the length of each post down to around 500 or so words.  This makes each post easy to read in one 5-minute sitting.

The downside to this approach is that it breaks up continuity for my readers.  You may have to go back and read previous posts to catch up with the latest in the series.

So, my question to all of you is this: Do you like the current approach of breaking up long posts into parts, or would you prefer that I publish longer blog posts and not break them into parts?  Please register your votes by leaving a comment.

I really appreciate your feedback and thank you for helping me make the blog better!

As we close out 2011, we will re-publish the top ten posts of 2011.  These are the posts written during 2011 that garnered the most page views during the year.  Over the next 2 weeks, we will count down from number ten to number one, finishing out the year.

I hope you will enjoy these posts if you have not seen them before.  There are many new email and RSS subscribers who have joined during 2011, and I am betting that many of these posts were missed by our new subscribers.

In 2012, we will start anew!  Please have a Christ-filled Christmas, remembering always what is important about this time of year.

God bless, Bill and Darrell.

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Hello everyone.  It seems that our Feedburner RSS feed service is broken and has been broken for about a week.  We are working on fixing it and hope to have a remedy today or tomorrow.

I’m sorry about this.  We’ll keep you posted.