Today marks two months since the debut of Terra Extraneus on Dec. 23, 2005. [Editor’s Note: Terra Extraneus was our first blog. In early 2007, we split Terra Extraneus into two blogs, creating Joshua One with about 150 faith- and ministry-related blogs originally published on TerraX. We have reproduced this post about our first days of blogging on both blogs.]
Rod Heggy and I are still just getting started as bloggers, but I know Rod would agree that these first two months have been a pretty wild ride.
The statistics far surpass what we could have imagined. During our first two months of online publishing, we have had 1,543 readers. We had 311 visitors during our first month, which means we’ve had more than 1,200 this second month. That’s pretty rapid growth. During the last seven days we have averaged 44 readers a day.
Readers have visited Terra Extraneus from every continent of the globe (well, nobody’s checked in from Antarctica yet). Thirty-seven countries. I must admit, I’ve never even heard of a couple of the countries on that list. Now they’ve heard of us.
From here in the U.S., we’ve had readers from 40 of the 50 states. We’re still waiting on Alaska, Delaware, Maine, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and Wyoming to show up. Would someone please ask Stephen King (Maine), Ted Turner (Montana), Wayne Newton (Nevada), Ben and/or Jerry (Vermont), and Dick Cheney (Wyoming) to pay us a visit? That would scratch a few more states off the list. I don’t think they have Internet access in North Dakota yet.
What has generated all the traffic? Several factors have contributed to attracting readers to Terra Extraneus’s pages. Here are a few of them:
• Our very first posts on this blog were reviews Rod Heggy and I both wrote of George Barna’s latest book, Revolution. Barna’s book, in which he not only predicts but essentially endorses the decline of the traditional church, has created considerable controversy. Our reviews continue to draw steady search engine traffic to Terra Extraneus, two months later. That’s one of the primary reasons we started this blog, to speak out on a broader scale to fellow Christians about our concerns for the condition of the modern church. It is gratifying to know that in our small way, we are succeeding in participating in the conversation. (Our reviews of Revolution are here and here.
• Although we have never met Joe Carter, Rod and I both admire what Joe does on his own blog, Evangelical Outpost, and as moderator of World Magazine’s blog, Worldviews. On Feb. 1, Joe gave Terra Extraneus a plug on Evangelical Outpost. The traffic that brief mention brought our way was phenomenal. On that very day we had 131 visitors – our record to date – and traffic continued to be elevated for several days after.Â
• We wrote a couple of articles about a church split in Dallas, and those articles have attracted scores of readers from the Dallas area. Rod and I wrote those articles because we care about the two churches specifically involved, and because we care about the condition of the American church in general. We hope those who came to read what we wrote share that motivation. We are grateful to one of the ministers of the church for enhancing the conversation by writing a letter to Terra Extraneus to discuss the issues from his perspective. (See “Dallas Minister Responds…”)
• Completely by serendipity, we ended up drawing traffic from scores of children from all over the world who are participating in Queen Elizabeth II’s annual essay contest. One of the British Commonwealth essay questions this year is “How hard is it to keep a secret?â€Â I knew nothing about the queen’s contest when I wrote a post last month titled “Hard to Keep a Secret.“ Quite ironically, that post was about how surprised we were by all the traffic our blog was receiving. We ended up drawing children from many of the 53 British Commonwealth nations who have been researching for their essays. I wonder if any of them mentioned Terra Extraneus in their essays.
What have Rod and I learned in our first two months as blogging novices? I think the No. 1 lesson has been the huge amount of time and hard work it requires to keep writing a quality blog. It was never our goal to write a “dear diary” blog, or to merely point out a few links each day to good posts on other sites. It is our goal to make substantive comments on issues that matter under the categories we have defined — including the Christian faith, the church, and public policy. To do so requires a lot of time devoted to reading and research, and then more time writing. It is something we are very much enjoying, although we also find the challenge overwhelming.
One of the great things that happened during Terra Extraneus’s second month is that readers finally started leaving comments. During the first month, as first-time readers sniffed around the edges of our blog, we had almost no comments. Then, finally, just a couple of weeks ago, the doors seemed to open and we began receiving lots of interesting comments from our readers. That’s the way we want it. Rod and I have some things to share, but our intention from the start has been for Terra Extraneus to be not so much a soapbox as a public forum. We do not believe we have all the answers figured out. We have some concerns, and we have some questions. Terra Extraneus is a place for you and us to discuss those concerns and explore those questions together. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
