100,000 PAGE VIEWS!!!

I Love That Film has finally made it to 100,000 page views! Since starting to write regularly on this blog back in March 2010, it has been a long and eventful journey to get here! It took nine months just to start getting over 1000 page views a month. Now for the last few months I've been getting over 10,000 views a month.

Search keywords that are bringing people here are an interesting bunch showing that either lots of people study or love films about racism with American History X and This is England being the most common keywords. Most interestingly Top Gun has also brought many people here despite the fact that I've only done one post that shared the news that there would be a sequel.

Since getting back from honeymoon, the blog has grown exponentially due to my renewed determination to write more and linking to my frequent posts at Filmoria and Static Mass Emprorium. I'm hoping that this exponential growth will continue and hope that I might be able to get I Love That Film to 20,000 views a month soon.

Thanks to all the kind people checking out the adverts around the page, I'm also getting paid for the first time; £68 this month! It's taken 20 months to get there but it feels like a huge reward to me and helps me to justify all the cash I spend getting up to London screenings these days!

I bet most bloggers start out similar to me. You decide that you just have to start writing about film and you hope someone somewhere might come across it and read something you wrote. You amble along for awhile getting a couple of hundred views a month. You start reading others blogs and becoming more inspired. You start commenting and contributing to the blogging community. Then you realise you are a part of an amazing community of people who love films as much, if not sometimes MORE than you do. You suddenly spend as much time reading other blogs as you do writing your own. I used to get my movie news from the Empire magazine website now I get it from loads of sources round the blogosphere. You start getting more and more hits on your blog, regular readers, lovely comments, twitter buddies and Facebook friends. You start doing a couple of guest posts at other blogs. If you've got no technical skills you can't make your blog look better so you start looking for other places to publish. Some of you expand your own empires but unfortunately setting up this most basic of blogs is the extent of my technical ability!

Anyway that's where I'm at! And thanks to Filmoria and Static Mass Emporium for giving me a chance to grow beyond this blog! It is such a great honour to write for both of these sites! I love the stuff I get to do for them and I hope to continue for a long, long time!

But most of all this post is about thanking all of you who read this! I felt so supported once I became a part of this community with many regular readers who would drop by and leave comments after reading. There is no way I would have kept going if I hadn't had the support of so many fellow bloggers who have given me so much more confidence in writing and shared so many tips and hints so graciously. It took me the best part of 30 years to realise that I didn't want to make films or write films and that I actually love writing ABOUT films more than anything else and now I'm settled with that thought, I'm going to do everything I can to turn this into a career.

THANK YOU SO MUCH to all who drop by the blog, read my stuff, leave comments, RT my posts on Twitter, share them on Facebook and check out those wonderful ads. Thanks to everyone who has helped me out with this blog or helped me to get more free screenings (especially you Scott Lawlor of Front Room Cinema). And thanks to anyone who has let me write for their site. I hope I will be writing about hitting 200,000 in less than 20 months time!

Thanks again everybody reading this!