Thursday, March 8, 2012

The Best Days for RPG Bloggers To Post?

I've been trying to review my traffic and get a feel for when posts seem to be the most successful and here's what I've come up with...

Mondays are good, if my post is up early enough. If my post isn't up by 8 a.m. or so CST, might as well hold it 'til Tuesday. People seem to like "news" on Mondays (updates on projects, etc.)

Tuesdays aren't bad. But audience falls of a bit from Monday. If you're a blogger, this is a good day for "filler" material - you know, stuff that doesn't require much of the reader. This is usually my day for new illustration, and has become Monster of the Week day.

Wednesdays suck. People must got shits to do. Like me, they're probably dealing with the thick of the week. Maybe I've been slow or slagging with my Wednesday posts, and that's why traffic is down, but I see a lot of new posts popping up on Wednesdays with other bloggers, but even when I post, I just don't see the traffic. (BTW, I wrote this on Wednesday in preparation for posting it on Thursday, not only to then have my best-trafficked Wednesday ever, but also one of my top 20 days of all time. And I picked up 2 new followers. The lure of yesterday's compended creatures must have either enticed, or I've got Wednesday pegged all wrong. I'm sorry Wednesday. Can you forgive me?)

Thursdays aren't bad. They're like Tuesdays, but seem to look forward toward the weekend. It seems to be when people are most interested in some last minute inspirations for their weekend gaming. I'm thinking about moving the Monster of the Week to Thursday.

Fridays are like Thursdays, but better. I know that by Friday I'm pretty much ready to start my weekend, and in some cases I already have. For now, I'll keep Friday as d30 Feature of the Week. There seem to be a good number of downloads of the PDFs that I post. I imagine the DMs out there are downloading and printing them to have them at the table on Saturday, in case they need them.

Saturdays... f'ing forget it. Unless my followers are sick or on spousal lockdown for the day, they're up and out early for a day of delving, and they ain't got time for no blogs, regardless of how interesting or insightful they might be.

Sundays are nice. Get up late, cup full of hot joe, and a head full of memories of yesterday's battles with lich lords and what not. See what happened at the other tables yesterday, and think about it in the context of others, or rules, or experiences. I used to post on Sundays about old games from my collection, or what I might have stumbled upon over the weekend. I'd like to get back to that.

2 comments:

  1. I think it's complicated. The day is a factor, but also how many days you've posted that week and the topic of the post. In general, I would say Mondays and Fridays are good days for me with Sundays and Thursday being a close second and potentially surpassing. Tuesday tends to not be as good as Monday, but again it can be on certain occasions. Wednesday about the same, but seldom the biggest day of the week.

    Now, I base my analysis on combination of visits and comments, with comments being more variable than visits.

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  2. You're right. It's definitely complicated. And because blogspot doesn't let you review past months (only current, that I can figure out anyway) it's hard to go back and actually review past days posted vs. traffic visits, and vs. random visits from the web. So what's above is general intuition based on this blog. There may be some things I wrote in second person above that should have been in first.

    You're also right that the topic goes a long way. I get constant traffic to the best of my posts--for example, the "Scrutinizing the Scroll" post has continued to generate a lot of daily traffic from lateral clicks (from other RPG blogs, etc.). In fact, in less than three weeks, it's #4 post of all time (to be fair, though, this blog only goes back about five months.)

    Google searches also account for a lot of my traffic, and I have NO way of figuring out those patterns. As examples, the "Discovered Dungeons" Undertemple Map", the "New Monster: Liger" and the "Free Dungeon Crawl Worksheet" posts continue to generate exterior traffic (from google search results vs. readers of other RPG blogs making their way here.) But I also add a ton of keywords to almost every post which feeds a lot of google traffic. For example, my ophiotaurus image is in the top 10 image results from a google search for "ophiotaurus."

    I guess we're all mapping our way through the blogger caverns 10' at a time.

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