Do Political Blogs in Montana Have Power?

I saw an article in the Missoulian today quote James Conner of the Flathead Memo, a blog in Kalispell.

It made me wonder…do political blogs in Montana have any influence, any power, any impact…anything? Or are we all just pissing in the wind here?

I’ve written three books on Google and increasing website traffic so I know a little about this. In case you think I don’t, here’s what my analytics from Google look like for the past month:

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So I’m getting just over 6,000 people directly from Google, which is just about 5% to 10% of all my monthly visitors. I like using Google Analytics, however, because they tell me which cities people are in, and you can see that I’m getting hit from all the urban hotspots in the state.

I feel pretty good getting a lot of traffic from Missoula, because I write about issues here. Helena is good too, because that’s where the state bigwigs are, and maybe some of my good ideas can rub off on them. I figure most of those hits in Bozeman are just history students copying my articles for their upcoming Montana papers this term (Missoula teaches Montana history in the spring now).

Here’s another good roundup of stats, showing which mobile users come here:

Looks like just 737 of those 6,000 visitors, and most using their iPads. How about service, which internet service provider are they using? Take a look:

As you could probably guess, Charter is getting the lion’s share, although there’s a lot of competition there with other small users. Remember, lots of people come to this site from all over the world:

Where do those folks come from, I mean, how do they find out about me in places like Liberia? It probably has something to do with my social activity as well as how my site’s keyed-in to Google:

So how about that social there? It seems like 613 hits is a lot, but is it really that impactful?

You can see I get most from Twitter now, which is no mistake, but you can also see that the audience is rather fickle, staying just 19 seconds on average. Google+, on the other hand, those users stay nearly 3 minutes. But then those are quirks of those networks and their users, something you can learn about in my book…well, I’m not going to try and sell you any shit today.

What I will do is convince you that Montana political blogs can have power and impact if you want them to. I got serious about this one after losing my election. Starting in July I really began putting out longer and harder-hitting articles, things that both Google and people like.

It paid off, and now I get traffic and have influence on these congressional races in the state. I know this because thousands of people have read the articles I’ve written. They may not seem like a lot, but to give you an idea:

• 836 people have read my bio of Amanda Curtis;
  


• Hot articles typically get 100 views in 1 day;
  


• All the Steve Daines finance articles get hundreds of views each month.
  

Maybe that’s not a whole lot to some of you reading from some of the big sites, but here it’s pretty good. But it makes me happy because I like writing about this stuff and it’s paying off. (Not financially, unfortunately)

Will it pay off for those running in November? I think so. John Lewis is going to win in 7 weeks and Amanda Curtis is going to decrease that poll gap by 10 points by the first week or two of October. Will she win? Boy, it’s going to be tough, but I think if the Montana political blogs keep at it, she could.

Yes, that’s right – Montana Republicans can’t blog, sorry.