So, this post is gonna be full of graphs. I feel like people have expressed some interest when I’ve done stuff like this in the past, so a blogwanking/mathy type of post every few months might start to be a more regular thing around here.
Disclaimer: I’m not bragging and I’m not whining. Some of you will not be doing this well and some of you will be doing WAY better. I don’t know that I have useful advice, but I’m good at taking it. 🙂
First, let’s look at daily hits over the last few weeks:
The interesting thing about my traffic is that without actually feeding everything into a spreadsheet (I’m not that far gone yet, but I keep almost doing it) is that I can’t really figure out when my good days are. Good times to post seem to be roughly every three hours– around 9, around noon, around 3, and around 7-9, which sort of breaks the pattern– but I don’t seem to have a single day or couple of days where traffic is better than others. Let’s look at weekly traffic:
Note two things: one, the huge jump in December, that stuck around for a few months and then went away, the enormous (and inexplicable) spike in April (I wasn’t Freshly Pressed or anything like that; I still have no idea where those views came from or why) and the steady build in traffic since the crash after that. I’m right about at the point where I was where traffic spiked in December again; it’ll be interesting to see if it happens again.
Here’s monthly, showing the same phenomenon, basically:
This month will edge May by a few hundred hits, I think, meaning I’ve had increasing traffic three months in a row, which is good. Still not up to December’s numbers but I feel like they’re coming.
Now the (mildly) depressing part– but, again, I’m not whining, I swear. Let’s look at book sales. The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 went on sale on May 10 and has had two free days. One I went to some trouble to promote, the other I deliberately did virtually nothing for. Sales are the red line and free copies are the green:
It has not escaped my notice that you can barely see the red line for most of the graph. Incidentally, I think the book’s going free again around my birthday in about a week and a half. Unless I decide that putting the book free on 4th of July weekend is as bad of an idea as making it free on Memorial Day weekend was.
Let’s take a closer look at sales:
Shit ain’t making me rich, obviously. I’ve never had a day of double-digit sales, and haven’t had a day with multiple sales since the week the book was released. Two days in a row with sales since then have been rare, too, and that dry spell for the first half of June was discouraging. Now, again, the goal for this book has not been to make me rich, and as soon as Skylights is out, it’s probably going to go permanently free. I’m also probably not going to go with the Kindle Select program again, because… well, you see the results of letting Amazon have the book exclusively. If they’re promoting it, I don’t see the results.
Not that I’m promoting it as much as I could be. I know you guys see a lot of it around here, and there’s Facebook and Twitter, but I’d be willing to bet good money that nearly every single copy has either gone to someone who already reads the blog or knows me personally or both. Maybe 95%. Thing is, that means that free or otherwise I’ve moved over 100 copies of my book to my readers on a blog that gets 200 hits a day; I can’t feel bad about that.
I still need to find some promotion methods that reach beyond my immediate audience, though. I’m working on some possibilities and am way open to hearing about more. And since I’ve got the grant I’ve got some room for paid advertising, too, if I can find anything that I think will convincingly work.
Meanwhile, I gotta keep working on the next book, and the book after that.
Oh, Twitter, right. See if you can pick out exactly when I started working on increasing my Twitter followers:
It’ll be interesting to see how long I’m able to keep up spending time on babysitting my Twitter presence and whether it’s going to prove useful in the long-term. My theory that no one ever clicks on links on Twitter appears to still be true; even with a couple hundred new people who haven’t seen previous promotional opportunities for Benevolence Archives, blog links and book links regularly go without being clicked on at all. Right now Twitter is still slotted in my brain under “fun” and not necessarily “useful,” but we’ll see what I can do to change that.
The Facebook page has 67 Likes, I think. There’s no graph for that.
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Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 
This is fabulous. I’m one of the people who have expressed the interest in the past, and let me just say, still interested.
RE: Click-throughs on Twitter. By my rough estimate, it’s one half of one percent of the people who see your links, plus people who use Twitter to keep up with you specifically. People retweet links without even looking at them. That Monday Blogs post got me 18 referrals from Twitter. That was the most ever. Usually I can look at my Twitter referrals and tell who gave me the referrals, because I know who routinely finds my posts that way,
The value of Twitter is in going directly at the traffic. It’s in broadening your overall network and finding that handful of people in every thousand who will read you regularly and/or talk back.
My daily traffic cycle follows yours, but Tuesdays and Wednesday tend to be better. than Mon-Thursday. And here’s something. My blogging posts do really well for Sundays. They don’t do one bit better during the week. So apparently the people who care about those are online on Sundays, and the larger audience doesn’t care one bit about them. The daily cycle is about when people are online, I think.
And is this blog only a year old? If so, I’m impressed by the number of views you’ve generated (and very happy for you – jealousy never did anyone a bit of good).
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is NOT in going directly after the traffic, dangit.
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Just a bit over, started June 4th of 2014.
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Well, you’re obviously doing something right. I’m interested to know – are you getting a ton of search traffic? That’s something we’ve not done well at so far.
I would be extremely interested in a blogwanking post with screenshots of your top referrers and most popular posts next time you have a mind to write one.
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Top referrer is Facebook, with 2466 hits; almost every post I make gets posted on my (real name) Facebook account, and will probably start getting posted to Luther Siler’s page soon enough, too. Second is the WP reader (1549), then search engines (1446, 90% of which is from Google) and then Twitter, at 687. Interestingly, the next entry on the list is whatever.scalzi.com, John Scalzi’s website, and nearly all of that is due to one link I left on the site when John blogged about something I’d just done a post on and I happened to be one of the first commenters. The rest get miscellaneous fast.
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Thanks for sharing. We’re on pace to generate about the same number of views you by the time we hit the year mark. But, we’re using three blogs to do it, and using all kind of collaboration and tag-team tactics to do it. No way any one of us could generate those views in a year with a single blog. I’m sure of that.Top referrer for Sourcerer, which has 15K all time views:
Search engines 1574 (also 90% google)
The reader 1068
Facebook (but these are from three or four lucky posts. We don’t share to the personal timelines very much) 1064
StumbleUpon (all generated in the last couple of months) 914
Twitter 821
All the rest are < 200.
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Hmm. How do you show up on StumbleUpon?
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Me and Jeremy both have accounts there. It’s a social bookmark sharing thing. You set up an account, follow people, and share links. We share links to our posts. it’s as hard to crack as twitter. We don’t understand it, but we’ve been experimenting with it since February. Sharing links, watching stats. Jeremy’s account seems to be picking up some juice, but we don’t understand why yet. He pulled 1K views to his own blog in over a 2-day period a couple of weeks ago. We’re trying to figure out what Stumble likes so we can do it consistently.
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Random: interesting that each of your three individual blogs have more followers than mine does if I’m getting more traffic than the three of you combined.
(I have noticed little correlation between the two, especially considering that I easily have a thousand more followers now than I did at the site’s peak traffic.)
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Yes. Followers have very little to do with traffic, or with engagement. If there was any real relationship there, I’d need 3K followers to generate the kind of comments I do. and I did know that they all had more followers. I thought I scanned your followers from the reader early on and you had about 1200 when I first met you.
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We miscommunicated at some point. None of our blogs have more followers. All of them combined do not have more than you.
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This is interesting– if I click on your entries in my Reader, it displays follower numbers and they’re as you say: combined, they don’t equal mine. If I look at the sidebars on your blogs, though, PTM alone has 5691 followers. I turned that feature off on my blog; it gave me about 500 more. I was looking at the sidebars earlier, thus the confusion.
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The sidebars are there so people can follow us by email, and they display those numbers. When we take them off, people ask us to put them back.
The way to gauge WordPress followers is to look at the blog in the reader, which is kind of a pain in the ass, but I use it all the time to see how many followers people have.
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The “Follow by Email” widget is a piece of social engineering. It includes all the social media following.If that’s what you’re using to judge, you’re looking at inflated numbers because @Sourcererblog’s Twitter account is connected to all of them and adds +2300 followers to the count.
blog followers-wise, wordpress only:
Part Time Monster is around 1200. Sourcerer just gained its 700th today, and the writing blog doesn’t even have 400 yet.
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Understood. These columns are getting very small.
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tiny even. 😉
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The top posts I’ll turn into a blog post at some point, like I did last time: https://infinitefreetime.com/2013/12/14/posts-of-the-year-2013/
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I find the sales data interesting. It makes me feel better about my own dismal numbers, which are similar to yours. I need to pick a date and lower my prices. I am thinking about entering the lower tier of KDP to see if the lower prices will generate movement. It amazes me that people will spend more money on Starbucks than they will for a novel. There’s no sense denying it, it’s obvious.
This was never intended to be a career for me either. In fact “working for food” has to be more profitable.
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Ah good, someone else who is obsessed with their stats
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I enjoy the graphs and the discussions. But an aside: My husband and I run an internet store (leather goods) and our sale really took a nose dive same time frame as your book sales… our thought – people are OUTSIDE, school letting out, summer vacation with the kids, going to graduations, weddings, enjoying the extended daylight, and not so much online… . Meanwhile we went outside, caught up on gardening, enjoyed the extended daylight, and filled up the stock! It gets real hard to sell to an audience that has left the building…..Just a thought.
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Who knows? And I say this with several years’ presence: just make sure the writing’s good. And it is!
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Interesting patterns, thank you.
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