I was talking to Phil the other day (everybody knows Phil, right?) and
we briefly discussed the fall slump that can typically happen in
internet traffic, as well as the tendency of bloggers to stop writing
as much in the fall as summer is quickly whisked away! This brought
back up a thought I'd had before, and so here it is:
We, as the RPG Blogging community, should share a lot of our
information when it comes to traffic, visitors, etc. This encourages
people to share advice, ideas, and encouragement as well as gives us
all a solid metric to guage how well our blog is doing. For best
comparison, I'd say the tools to use are Feed Burner and Google
Analytics, if you're blogging and not using both of those then you
should probably start right away! (Warning: setting up Feed Burner
isn't as simple a process at is seems, I've killed at least one
person's feed by suggesting this already)
If you don't know, Dave and I write at Critical Hits, and while we've
been obscenely blessed this year with insane increases in traffic, I
can already see a bit of this Fall Slump in not only our incoming
traffic, but our writing and our comments as well. Here is some of
our data, please feel free to reply with some or all of the below from
your own blog!
Critical Hits:
days since creation: ~1,080 (3 years)
# of posts: 1,011
# of primary contributors: 2
Most comments on a single post: 72
Traffic for September 2008:
Visits: 17,570
Pageviews: 28,861
Absolute Unique Visitors: 12,813
Traffic for last 6 months (April 1st - Sept.29th):
Visits: 103,089
Pageviews: 176,941
Absolute Unique Visitors: 70,375
Traffic for 2008 so far:
Visits: 151,044
Pageviews: 267,684
Absolute Unique Visitors: 103,434
I've provided a few timeframes, so that depending on how long your
blog has been up we have a good frame for comparisons.
Feed Burner stats:
Yesterday's subscribers: 619
Highest subscriber #: 668
Avg. Subscribers over last week: 627
August peak # : 550
July peak # : 432
June peak # : 376
I tried to include stuff that might be interesting to people, and
metrics which others can pretty easily reproduce, let me know if
there's something key missing. I figure putting things like this out
in the open (at least amongst us bloggers) could be quite beneficial.
Danny
--
http://www.Critical-Hits.com/
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