Metablog (Installment 1)
For a while I had my posts scheduled for a 1am release on any given day. I tend to write ahead by 2-4 days when I can, so that I can put something out there every day or two.
On the 18th, I experimented with posting at 6-8am . . . and had something like 100 views in about an hour!
For the bloggers out there: what’s the right posting frequency? Every day? Every other day?
What time to post gets you the most interest?
What kind of posts make people flock to your site? Rules nuggets? Play reports? Reviews?
I’d think that having one solid post every few days would ensure that so much doesn’t happen that people miss things . . . but Google Analytics tells me that, perhaps unsurprisingly, my “best day” since GA started tracking was January 10, with over 100 unique visitors that day. I posted three times: Forthcoming part 2, Serve up the Fun, and Travel in Gaming part 2.
There are different types of blogs that each require different strategies. You seem to be more of a deep thought content type blog than a chatty everything-about-me type blog.
The people that I read religiously post on a weekly schedule and I know the exact time that their posts go up. Being that consistent is a good ideal but maybe not realistic for in-your-spare-time blogging. Being on a regular schedule is helpful just from the standpoint of developing your writing, too. (If you get stuff ready in advance, you will be more likely to edit it and/or improve it.)
I target the east coast read something while I drink my coffee demographic. I don't know how much of the readership falls in with that, but it's how I imagine things. I have noticed that no one seems to read blogs on Fridays, so if you have some sort of filler thing, that's the best day to put it up. (Stuff like… question-for-reader or Friday-Elmore/Frazetta or whatever.)
The most effective technique seems to be that you should have multiple series going at once in rotation. People that get hooked on one particular thread of your blog will stick with you until you get back around to "feeding" them again. It's surprising when that happens. If you feel like you strike a chord on something… be sure to revisit and/or develop it again a few months later. That will develop your potentially non-overlapping groups of loyal readers.
Very interesting. For a while now, I've tried to have something up every day, or every other day at worst . . . with the exception of when I was on a plane to asia.
I play in two games a week, when they occur. There's almost always something to say about those, especially since they're both Pathfinder-based, but one is actual PF, the other GURPS DF. Then there's my usual "hey, I was thinking about this" stuff.
It hasn't seemed hard, so far, to keep up a regular patter.
If you have the stamina to put out daily or n days a week… that is definitely ideal.
It doesn't hurt that I keep doing things like "Pathfinder Readthrough" and (soon) "FATE Core readthrough."
Given the talk on the forums about Action being a very under-appreciated series in GURPS, maybe an Action read-through is merited, too.
I post no more than once a day, just because I read other people's blogs no more than once a day. If you post multiple times, well, I am likely to miss the previous (or later) posts.
I wonder if the sudden hits have a lot more to do with Google and other search engines doing automated searches than with actual readers. Certainly my blogger dashboard gives me a vastly inflated number compared with Google Analytics, so I'm thinking many of those hits are search engine results and not actual readers.
Interesting. Let me check it out.
Blogger Dashboard, 1/23: 252 pageviews
Google Analytics, 1/23: 190 pageviews.
So inflated by about a third.
I didn't figure out the trick to Analytics until Jan 8, so my monthly totals will be off until time goes by. I've had about 450 unique visitors, so says Analytics, and right now, about 40% of them are first-timers.
Anyway, about 70 "real" visits per day (and you're right, the number is about 120 with Blogger), but still pulling in new interest.
Guess we'll see. 🙂
I, for one, get pointed to your blog posts every time I log into G+, so that's what triggers my visits. I have much more invested in G+ right now than I ever did in FB, and visit a dozen times a day, so for me the more posts the merrier!
There's got to be a happy medium in there somewhere. I've got a while to find it, I think.
I know about most of them because Doug tags me in most of them 🙂