Sunday, September 24, 2017

Dan Learns How To Blog...

Here's a quick retrospective after 25,000 page views.  In 4 years, topics were all over the map.  Mainstream topics like hacking Skylanders brought organic traffic from search engines.  Posts in a niche subreddit has a way of bringing in links years on.  The Cards Against Mormonism and boardgame tables still get a few hits per week.

Advertising revenue was an interesting experience.  A free site has generated a whopping $10 in 4 years from Google, and I haven't seen a cent from Amazon referrals.  In all, it's interesting to see how hard it would be to make a living with just ad revenue.  Sponsorship makes a lot more sense in this light, but impartiality takes a hit.  The web runs on a sea of quid pro quo.

In terms of authoring content, I learned a few things that English class couldn't anticipate in 1999. Mentioning specific dates instead of relative dates keeps readers from having to calculate in their head and increases the possibility that they will stay for the whole article.  If you have a story idea that has been sitting in your drafts for more than 3 months, delete it.  Your enthusiasm to talk about it is probably not going to grow after that long.  Build logs and multi-part posts should be split into shorter posts.  This will ensure you stay on topic and don't ramble.  And don't talk about how long it's been since you last blogged.  I can assure you that no one it waiting with bated breath for your review of Behat's 3.4 release.

On to the next 25,000!  Hopefully it won't take me 4 years.