Thursday, September 12, 2019

State of the Gunblogosphere?

I started paying less attention to site numbers 'way back when The Truth Laid Bear and the "blogger ecosystem" finally went away for good, and I pretty much stopped altogether when Sitemeter went the way of the dodo. I couldn't tell you to the nearest five hundred what this blog's daily traffic is in this current year.

But traffic is important for monetization, and any money this blog makes for me is incidental; extra ammo money is great (and so's the occasional windfall for geriatric cat food by the case!) but it's not the end of the world if the faucet slows down.

Greg Ellifritz, on the other hand, has been diligently maintaining his blog. He's been diligently tracking traffic, and conscientiously putting out column-to-article length pieces multiple times a week.

And what Greg's noticed is...well, I'll let him tell you:
"When I first started realizing that I was hemorrhaging pageviews, I decided to write more. In 2019 I’ve been writing a few more articles each month. As compared to the same time period a year ago, my year-to-date writing is up 43,000 words in 2019.

An average novel is usually around 100K words. So I’ve basically written half a novel more free information this year than I have in any comparable time frame in the past years.

In August, I really busted my ass. I wrote 20 articles and my total word count was more than any other month in the history of my site. What did that get me? Fewer readers.

I got my August website stats update from Google. My hard work wasn’t enough. My total pageviews declined by 12.52% in the last month. The number of unique visitors to the site dropped 7% from July.
"
Greg's a smart dude and turns out a lot of quality content. Following him has taught me a lot, and I recommend his stuff highly.