As you can, the above is a look at my traffic in graph form from Google Analytics in 2009.

There have been a number of significant spikes, the two most obvious being “If God Text Messaged the 10 Commandments” and “The 10 Commandments of Twitter.” If you’d like to know my thoughts about the latter one in particular and how it helped me generate tons of traffic, you can check this post-mortem post here.

What this doesn’t show visually (very well, at least) is the general increase of traffic over the year. Honestly, when I looked at it initially, I was unimpressed. It looks just slightly up and to the right.

Taking a look at the week view and the month view provided a better high-level picture:

Yup.  A steady increase and a bit of a drop in the 4th quarter of this year.

You might imagine that the drop of traffic should be a concern but it’s not really a large one. Starting in the 4th quarter I dropped my posting significantly, literally posting half of the number of times I historically.

After we completed the first year I dropped to about 2 posts a day, and have consistently kept that up (except for Sundays, of course). Where has all that time gone? In short, strategy. I’ve been planning for 2010 for the last 3 months and I’m extremely excited to reveal to you guys shortly what it’s beginning to look like.

Another quick reminder and lesson learned from these graphs is that blogging, like many other things, is a game of time. It just takes time to increase traffic. Year over year over year I expect it to slowly increase. You can’t expect the huge spikes (and don’t plan for it… just prepare for it) and neither can you really plan for the slow-times either.

Tomorrow we’ll look at overall visits, pageviews, and more.