New Month, New Leaf
As many of you (those of you still around) know, this blog has taken a bit of a nose-dive in the last few months. It hasn’t been often that I’ve had a substantive post, aside from maybe Tweet Week, which was pretty much a bust as far as traffic was concerned.
As you know, I started my eBook (er, course) around February 15th of this year. (Somewhere in that area anyway.) At first, it didn’t affect the blog, but then it started taking its toll. Here is the traffic graph for the year so far:
As you can see, February’s traffic was down from January. Much of January’s traffic came from my postings on the Twitter Phishing scheme that went on in early January.
Traffic went down in February, but was still up from December’s levels. Traffic went up a bit in March, then continued a nosedive through the next two months. It leveled off around May and June and steadily increased from there.
While I got deeper into working on my eBook, I often hit writer’s book when coming to post here. In April, however, I largely wasn’t working on the eBook (waiting to hear from people on my first draft), yet traffic continued to decline. I think this was because I still wasn’t in the “groove” of things.
My analysis is this. In the early part of the year, I got a nice bump in traffic. But, while I got sidetracked with my eBook project, I didn’t pay enough attention to this blog, so I probably didn’t retain many of the new readers I had brought in. As new readers dropped off, the number of visitors also dropped. However, I maintained my loyal group of readers while also keeping search engine traffic to prior posts.
So, while new quality went down, I still had traffic from a quantity of old quality. In other words, your previously written content continues to pay dividends long after you’ve written it. But, fresh content is still important, even if it is lower quality. Bear in mind that lower quality will result in a smaller percentage of repeat visitors. Eventually, you may reach a plateau where new low quality with old high quality results in a break-even rate of traffic.
Which means I need to increase quality in order to increase traffic to this blog, which I need to do since I lost two advertisers last month. (Ouch!)
Now that I’ve completed my eBook, even though I will continue to do promotional work on it, I can invest a little more time into improving the quality on this blog, and having more substantive posts and fewer fluff posts.
It also bears mentioning that, during the same time frame, my level of commenting on other blogs went down as well. So, that no doubt impacted traffic somewhat as well. But, during this time frame, I don’t think it had a significant impact. Since the beginning of this year, and perhaps as far as last fall or so, I haven’t been commenting on a lot of new blogs, so commenting was probably largely negligible in terms of traffic here. While I did comment on my regular list of blogs, albeit less frequently, I don’t think that negatively impacted repeat visitors too much, especially given that a number of those bloggers also reduced their level of blogging as well, so it may have been a wash.
At any rate, yesterday I started going through my list of “blogs to visit again.” These are blogs I’ve visited in the past, but have not visited regularly. I think I commented on one or two of them yesterday. More than that were no longer very active and at least one was completely gone.
In other news, “Hollydale Mental Hospital” made my list of the Top 10 keywords people use to find my blog during the month of August. Apparently, it’s not just in Speedy’s imagination. It’s a real place and it’s purportedly haunted or something. I’m presuming it’s haunted by ghosts. You never know, though. It could be haunted by leprechauns or something. Maybe gremlins.
My traffic has dropped as well. I have folks that stop by but don’t bother to comment and Akismet is working overtime to keep up with the amount of spam I get.
I’m thinking about putting Debo Hobo on sabbatical until January while I focus on other projects.
I usually wait for your “Miscellaneous Ramblings” because the “Travel Blurbs” don’t always give me enough to work with, considering I’m basically a non-traveller.
My traffic is in the gutter lately. But I suppose that’s because I only have time to blog / comment one day a week, since I too am working on a book.
But, I REALLY miss you over on my blog. And I am still HOPING you haven’t stopped by because you are busy and NOT because I did something to offend you??
blogging …. the simple formula!
Comments = half of the amount you leave elsewhere + loyalists = “Total Comments”
Traffic = PR * (#posts + keyword use)
I use images to drive traffic. They love my ugly dog photo
It use to be you could link everyone and they would come a runnin, but that was in the blogging craze of 2003 to 2007 when everyone loved Technorati. Now links are almost a lost breed of purebreed showdogs. I can link 150 blogs, and 2 will show up … one will comment. OF course, I am STILL link happy and mad in the HMH. Thanks for the props DCR !!!!!!!!!!