As you may know, I usually get between 50 and 80 unique readers a day here. Once a week, usually either on Mondays or Thursdays, I go over the 100 readers mark and it’s all good.
I also have been self-promoting my stuff on StumbleUpon, quite a bit. Well, enough to be gently chided about it by a reader.
While I try do it only for posts that have generated good discussions, like PM’s ‘I want to be a DM‘, I got the feeling yesterday that this practice may be bad form.
Feedback and opinions on this are always welcome.
I usually get about 60 more unique visits whenever I do this and the blog goes back to it’s usual traffic the next day.
The thing is, yesterday I got well over 1200 unique readers! Almost all of them for my ‘DMing for adult gamers‘ piece. And not just insta-click and move away, each visitor spent on average 2 minute here. Un-be-li-vable (link is in French… stretch those high school French classes… it’s hilarious)
So it’s not just because people expected to see Pr0n. So I guess some people really liked it…. weeee!
I’m starting to think I should write a book on tabletop gaming psychology… I smile when I envision my ‘about the author’: Philippe-Antoine is a Microbiologist, working in a human genetics lab. Although he has never studied psychology nor actually worked professionally in the RPG industry, he writes good for reals (sic… duh!). he has also been known to be a kickass DM when he manages to fluff up his game!
And the Cover review: “A master of Cruch that has finally pierced the secret of RPG Fluff- W. Baur”
Okay…. too much sugar in them Froot Loops… Earth to Phil, Earth to Phil… time to let go of the digression…
Anyway, things got so crowded here yesterday that my site crashed a few times… for which I apologize… my host shuts things down if a site uses more than 40 CPU seconds within a 60 second period. It apparently dislikes ‘sloppy .php scripts’ whatever that means… I am no Shamus Young but I’m very lucky to have pals like Graham and PM giving me a hand in this!
I’m pretty sure things will come back to normal today…. it’s still scary when it happens the first time!
All-right people, I have a game tonight, and I managed to throw even more badly designed PC-killer monsters out the window than previously planned.
Wish me luck!
Good job Phil!
Crashing your website is always a good sign!
Talk about a Crunch Overlord!
Good game tonight my man!
And cant wait to play with your company again =)
Thanks Mike… it was a crunchy game all right… and everyone is level 9! Ding X5!
The little I know about SU’s inner workings: When a website is first submitted, it gets at least around 30 views. The speed drops pretty radically, unless someone gives the site a thumbs up, which causes a minor (5 or 10, perhaps) influx of visitors.
Even if nobody likes the site, it still gets a few views per day.
I think that submitting multiple pages from the same domain does not generate that much views, but it may simply happen if they are discovered in very short periods of time. I haven’t really experimented with this yet.
Oh, yeah: I have no objection to you shilling your website through SU. I just didn’t think that stumbling every page is a worth the effort.
The big thing that made the site freeze up is that most of those 1200 uniques came within a 2-3 minute span, according to the server logs.
But, from the looks of it (and the apparent fewer uniques today), few of those decided to stay around after the one article.
So while SU seems to be good for instantaneous spikes, it doesn’t seem to be great for solid increases in readership.
Personally, I’d let the users submit pages they like to SU instead (though you could always make it easy with a “submit to SU” link, or something). But I’ll leave you to look at the logs for before and after that day, and decide for yourself whether purposefully wanging your server is worth the traffic increase.
As far as the inner workings of SU, I have no reason not to believe Tommi, but I have trouble believing that a separate page from the same domain would affect the other submitted pages. (Though, of course, submitting multiple pages at once will push previously-submitted pages down the list, resulting in fewer reads, if this is what you mean.)
I’m still experimenting with the tons of ‘look at this’ web gadgets and I am noticing that it does not change all that much.
I don’t think I’ll add a ‘submit this’ button. I’m starting to believe that word of mouth and me posting on other people’s blogs has a more significant effect…
I’ll continue to focus on trying to post interesting stuff.
🙂
“I’m starting to believe that word of mouth and me posting on other people’s blogs has a more significant effect…”
Yep, totally. You’re more likely to get people that stick around too! Getting SUed or dugg caused a big spike and may be satisfying from pure numbers, but the two ways you list definitely produce the results I like best.
SU causes some interesting phenomenons when you experience its affect the first couple of times with very popular articles. I decided to go with just word of mouth and not worry about enabling folks to submit articles because really isn’t the reason you’re doing this probaby the same as mine – as a labor of love?
The goal may simply be to increase the number of readers long term, not for money but to increase your “sphere of influence” so keep submitting your popular articles based on comments or original/helpful content, it’ll pay off in the long run.
Keep up the good work! 🙂
Labor of love, for sure. Both for ChattyDM here and myself. (There’s a reason neither of us bother with ads at this point, just like you.)
Also, damn, Andy, you post a lot. 😛
Agreed. Paying 6$ a month is not a lot for something so fun.
Well, I’ll stay clear of SU for some time… and I won’t clutter each of my post with a ton of little square thingnies…
I also stumble some of your posts, so not totally frowned upon.
Heh, i should write something like that. Since i am a Psychologist. I think Milgram would have something to say about player DM relations.