I’m dead tired, so I’ll tackle this instead on writing a sub-par Session report of our Pathfinder for newbies game (which went well for all except PM, he sucks at dice, period!)
See part 1 here.
The List is taken from Geeks are Sexy and posted by Piggybankpie‘s Patrick.
Let’s continue, shall we?
6. Busted by Crappy Reference Program
I don’t use reference programs to increase traffic. I think linking to other blogs, commenting on them and making post that link to good posts of other bloggers is the slower but stronger way to go.
I did like the ‘link exchange’ proposal I got from Trask over at LivingDice.com and I did the same with Evil DM yesterday because I have been on his for quite some time….
BTW Evil DM was one of the earliest bloggers to take notice of mine! Thanks Jeff. (Go click his ads , Jeff wants to buy Hollow Earth Expedition).
7. RSS subscribers too long to increase.
Well I creased the 100 point a few weeks ago, and am now sitting at around 170. This is a slow progress but that’s the only way to go at it I think. My big break came with Yax pimping me in his top 50 RPG sites, guest posting on Johnn Four’s Newsletter and getting a shoutout or two by high volume blogger Shamus Young. (See what I’m doing here? This is always appreciated by bloggers and it fosters a stronger community spirit)
8. Your WordPress theme sucks
I can attest that lot of the free WP themes are rather lame. (And let’s not get into Blogger). But when I look back at it, people want quality content first (without, if possible, having their eyes bleeding while reading them). I was incredibly lucky to have Graham help me by finding a sweet theme and hacking in the color schemes, Banner and the various plugins we wanted to have around here.
Oh and just so you know, Graham and I have never seen each other or spoken. We became buddies through the blog. I can say the same for a lot of the people that now feature on my blogroll. So blogging can be a very rewarding experience!
9. Not Enough Traffic.
Well I can’t complain here… I average about 300-500 page views a day from 100-200 unique visitors.
But when you start, seeing that 95% of your traffic comes from your own IP is a bit of a bummer.
Here’s a trick I already touched on earlier here (apart from the 2 golden standard of ‘write interesting things’ and ‘master enough English to be readable’). Link to other blog post… it’s blogger’s honey that brings them to your post real fast.
Look at Kiltak, chief blogger of Geeks are Sexy . He dropped by from yesterday’s post, so it does work!
10. You got banned from Social Media Sites.
There is a fine line to walk between submitting your own posts to social media and shilling shamelessly your twitter updates. I used to Stumble a few of my posts, and I must be honest that the few multi-thousand spikes I got were from posts I submitted. I stopped since, but I’d say go ahead, but do it sparingly. If a post of yours gather a few comments and fosters good discussions, go ahead and submit it yourself. I certainly will Stumble my Overlord and Magnificent Bastard posts in the near future.
There you have it, my dose of meta-blogging. Tomorrow evening I’ll be back with an adventure post and will revert later with this week’s adventure prep for my Ptolus campaign and taking another stab at the Silvervine review.
My site had more or less zero traffic for the first five months or so. I had a few dozen readers, at best.
Writing posts is sort of like batting in baseball. Once in a while you’ll luck out and hit on the right subject at the right time, and knock one out of the park. Suddenly your traffic shoots up.
The trick is to keep swinging and not get discouraged no matter how many times you whiff.
I think the feedback loop you mentioned in your previous post is a good one. I think the trick to avoiding burnout is to have more than one subject to write about. Get a few subjects together so you can switch when you start to get sick of one of them.
Yeah tell me about it…. and I’m often surprised about the posts that do gather a lot of momentum.
As for subject loop… that’s why I have general Geekiness and Meta-blogging as minor subject on top of a bunch of series!
Thanks for dropping by, I love the Wavatar plugin and so do the commenters by the way.
Gee, now I feel bad about not subscribing to more RSS feeds. I only use them for webcomics since the other normal blogs post on a near daily basis. Across the top for me: Goblins, Darths & Droids, Chainmail Bikini and Looking For Group.
Still not planning to get more RSS tho. Sorry!
Maybe I’ll click an ad to make up for it.
Making you feel bad wasn’t the intent. RSS feeds are just one way of keeping stats on a blog. Unique visitors and page views are another.
I do the opposite of you. All the blogs I read I keep up in a RSS reader. The webcomics, I drop by to see if they updated.
Should have thrown a couple of smiles in there as well. Too late to edit: 🙂 🙂 🙂
No sweat friend, that will teach me to respond to comments when my brain screams for sleep!
I should just calm down about traffic to my blog, though I think I mostly have. I just hate it when I do get a spike and it’s all 0 second visits.
And then I love days like today where I can see that, even if it was in another tab or page part of the time, someone spent nearly 20 minutes on my front page.
Still it’s hard when no one says anything. It becomes exactly that: an echo chamber.
.-= Sam Erwin´s last blog ..My New Campaign, or “We are the Champions” =-.
@Sam: I see that you’re digging deeper and deeper in my archives. I love when people do that. Yes, you should stop obsessing about your stats… but I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t do it when I was at the same place you are blog wise. I still check stats about once a day.
As for empty posts, well I do agree that they still freak me out when i get them…
🙂