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
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
Posts
That's a nasty bug, Foo. Thanks for hitting on that.
ReplyDeleteLuckily, I haven't experienced this while I was using WordPress. However, there's another problem which is caused by my RSS service (Google FeedBurner):
ReplyDeleteAs 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.
Just curious where we reader users get counted.
ReplyDeleteI 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.