What I am doing now

You are most likely here because you enjoy crafting. I have been reading up on some of the WoW issues regarding gold making, which make me realize that WoW is not the game for me.

If you want to play a game where gathering and crafting is the cornerstone of the economy, and are not faint of heart, I recommend EVE Online. EVE even has releases purely to support industry. You can play for free if you are good enough manufacturer or trader.

Be the builder in a villainous world.

My journey can be seen at http://foo-eve.blogspot.com.au

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24 February 2011

Using draft posts to reduce your readership

Blogger is generlly great for me.  It's free, I don't need to have advertising.  I use blogger's built in stats, google analytics, and google webmaster tools to track readership. 

I am vain enough to care about readership numbers, and the above stats help to identify what posts readers care about. 




My traffic sources, by percentage are:
    68% from refering sites,
    15% from direct traffic
    10% from search engines with people looking for foo (foo wow; foo's wow musings; foo's musings etc)
    7% from search engines searching for other WoW related items

Referring sites make up the majority of my traffic.

Just My Two Copper  refers traffic to me via their RSS feed on the right hand side but only shows the most recent few posts accross many blogs. I believe The Undermine Journal also uses a similar method.  Breevok's site sends traffic from content as well as links, as we refer to each others blogs on a regular basis.  So, conservatively 33% of my traffic comes from recent posts with a catchy title and intro.  It is likely to be closer to 50% by the time other blogs are included.  By recent posts, I mean being in the previous 8 posts made by regular gold bloggers regardless of website.  Once 8 others have posted a blog article, this traffic disapears.  RSS feeds use a date stamp to indicate recency. 

I am writing up relatively detailed posts for darkmoon cards.  My post yesterday was created late at night, but due having just published a raiding post, I manually delayed it for 12 hours before posting. 

I was also looking at traffic and traffic sources, and had a look at both JMTC and TUJ, and my most recent post was already at the bottom of their lists.  WTF?  As far as the RSS feeds were concerned, the post that I had just published was already 12 hours old, and at the bottom of both JMTC and TUJ's lists.  Based on the time that I originally created my post, not the time that I published it.

Nearly half of my readership will miss my 'Darkmoon on the rise' post.  Well they would have, but now that you have read this post, you can go back and read it.

I will use a mix of the following solutions.
  • Publish blogs as soon as you create them.
  • When you have a draft post in blogger, copy it to a new post to refresh your date created, and post the copy.
  • Create a new dummy blog, and experiment with scheduled drafts, and how long you need to leave a post before it's time resets.
  • Log a bug with google

3 comments:

  1. That's a nasty bug, Foo. Thanks for hitting on that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Luckily, I haven't experienced this while I was using WordPress. However, there's another problem which is caused by my RSS service (Google FeedBurner):

    As they only check once a day, recent posts are usually delayed by a few hours, thus appearing at the bottom of all referring sites too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just curious where we reader users get counted.

    I saw you mentioned on JMTC or CGF or somewhere, followed the link and added you to my google reader. So now every so often I make sure I don't have any unread posts from my A-List.

    Back when I was using bloglines, it would have been easier to tell. Now that I am using the google reader, I guess it would just get included in the search referrals? Although if it's a small post, then I can just read it in GR and never visit your site and thus not be counted at all.

    FYI: GR details shows you with 154 readers and doing 5.1 posts per week.

    ReplyDelete

Due to the blog mostly being inactive and the only comments recently being anonymous spam; I have restricted comments to "Registered Users"; hat includes anything google recognises as an account (google, openId, wordpress etc). I am still (mostly) active on foo-eve.blogspot.com

Blogger comments supports basic html. You can make a link 'clicky' by <a href="http://yoursite/yourpage">yoursite/yourpage</a>

Disagreements are welcome - especially on speculative posts. I love a great disagreement.

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