How do you measure success? I’ve had an interesting experience, lately—having dissolved my onwards and upwards, ever-steadily-growing print magazine in favor of going greener (paperless), my advertisers, friends, my national green community…my grandma…everyone I have contact with no longer knows how to tell if elephant is still a going concern, or just another blog. They used to be able to pick up the latest magazine, see that it was heavier, see it on the racks of Whole Foods or Pharmaca and know that we’d grown another 5 or 10% over the last quarter.

So here it is: my first paperless traffic report. You want transparency, you got it!

elephant journal may’ve been around for 6.5 years—but we only switched fully from iamelephant.com to elephantjournaldotcom just three short months ago, and began focusing on our web growth just one month ago, when our last paper issue hit the stands. And so our growth is all ahead of us—as long as we have some nurturing community in our infancy. It takes a village of advertisers and readers, both, to grow a mindful, independent news source into something that can actually have some small effect on our wonderful, fragile, troubled world.

Of course, we wouldn’t be transparent if things weren’t going really, really well for our really, really small news web site. That line may look gradual, above, but we just hit 3000 unique visitors (who each click on 2 pages, on average) for the first time this week. And we just hit 2000 unique visitors…this week, too. It’s a heady time, where we’re experiencing new success—and failure is like a cliff, only one or two missteps away.

We’ve overtaken some peers.

One of the reasons we’re growing: yours truly, ele’s founder Waylon Lewis, just started a column for Huffington Post—a hugely popular daily news blog. Another reason: our videos are all over the net. Another reason: our blogs consistently achieve high google rankings commensurate with size and popularity of our subject. Another reason: our facebook following. Another reason: my Buddhist community. Another: and on our eighth day in e-business, God created Stumbleupon. Finally: Anna, Lindsey Wolf, Lindsey Block, Heather Mueller, Todd Mayville, Yesica and yours truly: thanks to our small but growing steadily blogging team of mindful writers, we have some good original content out there on a daily basis.

Join them, email: [email protected].