It’s Our Birthday!
Today, one year ago, I launched thelobbyist.net.? thelobbyist was an idea that was burning a hole in my back pocket for a couple of years.? For good or bad, most of my peers will tell you I’m very opinionated.? Admittedly, often to the point of needing to shut my mouth. (My mother often reminds me of this).? But I had never delved into the foray because my attention was focused on finishing school, work, finishing grad school, and then getting back to work.? Finally, last Fall, after watching the Shawshank Redemption for the umpteenth time and hearing the immortal words of Andy Dufresne, You gotta get busy living, or get busy dying, it dawned on me that I would most likely never be less pre-occupied.? It was now or never.
So I began the tedious process of putting together what I imagined would be a seldom viewed blog of my thoughts on politics.? In late October I mentioned what I was doing to my close friend Tom Qualtere, currently the Research Assistant for Ed Feulner at The Heritage Foundation.? He was ecstatic about the idea and wanted to get on board as well.
After a few months of us blogging, to our surprise we were gaining a fairly sizable audience for our scope.? Between our first month with roughly only 300 visitors, we had moved to about 4,000 unique visits. (To be specific, a website usually receives many more visitors, but much of the traffic is repeat visitors.? A unique visit is characterized as 1 visit per unique individual.? In other words, a website may received 2000 total visits, but only 500 were unique.? Meaning that each unique visitor visited the site roughly 4 times.)
It was at this time we decided to step it up a notch and revitalize the image of the website into a true commentary presence on politics.? Our friends Dustin Siggins and RJ Caster jumped on board and have been a real boon to our efforts.
Since that time we have grown by leaps and bounds.? This month we are on track to break 20,000 unique visitors and over 100,000 total visits.? That communicates to us that our audience loves what we do, and our growth is obvious evidence of this.? If it wasn’t for our audience, we would obviously just be talking to ourselves.? We thank our fans and friends, who have helped push us forward and keep us motivated to do what we do!
I would also personally like to thank Tom Qualtere, Dustin Siggins, RJ Caster, and Wallace Forman for their fantastic work every month.? And additionally, a special thanks goes out to our contributors Sam Theodosopoulos, Catherine Helsley, and our brother-sister duo of Nick J. and Annie Rohrhoff.? Thanks for all your hard work!
We’ll keep doing what we do, and strive to continue doing it better.? And you guys keep coming back, and we will look forward to celebrating our birthday with you again next year!
-nick r brown
