I find that analytics tends to drastically under-report traffic compared to other site tools (like webalizer and... er... the other one. Can't remember what the other one is called). Webalizer tends to over-report (because it doesn't really distinguish between real users and web-crawling bots), but I think the answer leans closer to webalizer than it does to analytics.

Of course the important thing is that you're writing and people are responding positively.