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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Major Update Changes

This is my planning shenanigans face.
Over the last couple of months my pageviews have been going steadily downward.  While December was 18k and January actually hit 22k, February was not quite 17k and it looks like I'll be lucky if March hits 15k.

This isn't the setback it might seem to be at first.

First of all, I'm not going to "Ho Hum" 15,000 page views a month like it's not a big deal.  With the possible exception of my own traffic the months prior, there isn't a bellwether by which that's not breathtaking and fantastic.  Secondly, some of that is my own fault.  I wasn't teaching for a lot of December and part of January, I was doing a post every day--sometimes two--with no days off, and I was self promoting pretty aggressively across social platforms to see which ones were worth my time (Stumbleupon) and which ones would take lots of time and effort to build up a reputation before they would even bring me in a few hits (Reddit).

In February, my teaching schedule started back up, I went to Dundracon, I started taking a couple of days off a week, and stopped the self promotion.  Of course, my pageviews plummeted.

But what was interesting to me was that the revenue did not.  If anything, I've gotten a couple more donations in the last month or two than the months before that.

It's tough to watch your traffic tank since analytics provide one of the only tangible yardsticks for how a blog is doing.  But I knew why, I knew it would happen, I knew hard numbers were still impressive even without their soft bump from my "blog Hairography.  Having the trickle of money increase may have also softened the blow.

Anyway, I need to incorporate what I've learned into how I move forward.  All the blog articles about getting traffic are about SEO and cheap tricks.  No one ever really writes about how you have to decide how much not-writing you have to do, how to keep people coming BACK to a blog (instead of just stopping by once), or how to decide if your blog is probably still going strong when it's numbers are going down, so I've had to figure those things out as I go along.  I can become a slave to the pageviews, have no days off from blogging, spend more hours a week on social media, write more articles, watch the house fall apart, and dread any day I have any other obligation from teaching to a social plan.

So, after the last couple of weeks and closely watching the numbers I generate when I don't do anything at all, or when I just pick one good past article and put it on G+ and FB, plus after looking at things I'm getting to less than I'd like, such as my obligations to clean house or my desire to write more fiction, I've decided to rethink the schedule.  I know I want to do some kind of "main" article each week and The Mailbox seems to be popular (when people write in), but posting frequency and any other sort of schedule are up in the air for now.

2 comments:

  1. Well, if it's any consolation, I don't come by your blog nearly as often as I should!

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    Replies
    1. It actually IS some consolation, but taking a good look at how much not-writing I'm doing (and how much the rest of my life is falling apart) makes this a long time coming. Artificially skyrocketing numbers kept me bewitched.

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