The Belated One-Year Anniversary Post

This blog was a year old on Nov. 7, but at that point I was too sick to think about an anniversary post. I do need to mark the milestone, though. I pulled a few stats from here, Part Time Monster, and my personal blogs yesterday, and I’ll share them today. As always with these types of posts, I’m neither bragging nor whining. Just sharing the info because I find it helpful when other bloggers share theirs. If you don’t care about stats, it’s all good. We do an awful lot of pop culture blogging here, and I do hope we can still be friends 🙂 Here’s the kickoff post from last November, if you’re interested in reading it.

First I will do a breakdown of various stats, then I will total them up and discuss them.

Sourcerer

Blog Followers: 954

Page Views: 27,535

Contributors Published: 9

Number of posts: 625, including this one.

Comments Generated: 4,126

Best Day: 391 page views

Best Month: June (3,434 page views)

Top Post: Is Batman a Marvel Character Trapped in the DC Universe? by Jeremy. 1,293 views. No other single post here has broken 300 views.

Top Referrers: We’re at 6,400 search engine views. The WordPress reader, Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon are the only other referrers that have gotten us more than 1,000 views.

Part Time Monster

Blog Followers: 1,955

Page Views:  28,432

Contributors Published: 7

Number of posts: 460

Comments Generated: 4,945

Best Day: 266 views

Best Month: May (3,307 views)

Top Post: Finnick Odair: Hooker/Gladiator with a Heart of Gold and Feminine Masculinity (666 views; the Monster has three other posts that have more than 500 views, as does Diana’s about page).

Top Referrers: Search engines have been good for 6,188 views. The WordPress reader, Facebook, and Twitter are all worth about 1,200 views; next is Sourcerer (400 views). No other referrers have gained the Monster more than 200 views.

My Former Blog/Just Gene’O (adding the stats for these two blogs together, because they are really one blog; the follower and page view numbers in parentheses are the breakdown)

Blog Followers: 640 (435/205)

Page Views: 7,750 (4,955/2,795)

Number of posts: 281

Comments Generated: 1,571

Best Day: 322 views

Best Month: April (1,171 views at My Former Blog, because I did the A to Z Challenge as the Writing Catalog there). Just Gene’O generated 990 views in August.

Top Post: My Saturday Coffee linkup post (301 views; this one post accounts for a third of my traffic from August).

Top Referrers: My Former blog has 380 search engine views and 275 from Twitter. Just Gene’O isn’t up to 200 views from any source yet.

Totals for all the Blogs:

Blog Followers: 3,190

Page Views: 63,717

Number of posts: 1,366

Contributors Published: 13 (this number doesn’t total because Jeremy, Diana, and I are only counted once, even though we contribute both here and at the Monster).

Comments Generated: 10,624

Discussion

One thing you can’t see from these stats is that Sourcerer and Part Time Monster are neck-in-neck for 2014. As of yesterday, we’re generating the same number of average daily views (82) and the Monster is only ahead by 100 views for the year. The difference of 900 views happened in November and December of 2013, when the Monster was running as an everyday blog with my help. At that point, I was mostly posting music videos here and only doing two or three quality pieces a week at my personal blog. And keep in mind that 400 of the Monster’s views are direct referrals from Sourcerer.

There’s a lot of follower overlap here. I have no idea how much, but we don’t actually have 3K+ unique blog followers. Our total social media following is around 10K, and almost three quarters of that is on Twitter. I put our engaged, regular following at somewhere between three dozen and sixty. But that is totally a guess. It’s hard to gauge because everyone doesn’t come around every day, and some people only visit weekly or twice a month, but I still count them as regulars because they’re consistent and sometimes they comment.

These numbers tell me that without question, Part Time Monster is our most successful blog. It’s generated the same number of views as Sourcerer, and done it with almost 200 fewer posts. And the traffic over there is more consistent. Sourcerer has higher peaks, but it also has lower valleys. This is not surprising. When we started these blogs, I set them up to work this way. The real surprise to me is that Sourcerer is keeping up and doing it with fewer than 1K followers. A year ago I did not expect Sourcerer to be this successful, nor did I expect to see the amount of engagement we’ve gotten on all three blogs, which is, I think, exceptional given the size of our overall network.

Reasons why Part Time Monster is more successful:

1. Content. Diana’s just plain better at writing to entertain than I am. You can see this clearly when we post at one another’s blogs. The Monster loves my photos, but only tolerates my written stuff. Sourcerer, on the other hand, loves Diana. In fact, if you look at the numbers, I am the least entertaining blogger we have. Our relative strengths and weaknesses are something I understood very well going in, so I am neither surprised nor dismayed by it. This is why I say that if I didn’t have a group to blog with, I’d just do it as a hobby and post a couple of times a week. I’m a fine writer with a good eye for art, but there’s a lot more to blogging than the writing. I’ll never be the guy who produces the sort of content that turns casual browsers into fans. I’m the grease in the wheels, and that is ok by me. I am good at it, and it is a role I enjoy.

2. Diana is better at maintaining relationships, she started with a better network than I had, and she’s used WordPress a lot more than I have in the last year. I spent most of last winter and the entire spring exploring nine different networks and learning to do Twitter growth. So my network on WordPress is smaller. And since we privilege network depth over breadth, which means we care more about engagement than the size of our following, dividing my time among all those networks means I’ve suffered on WordPress. Hopefully, I’ll be able to catch up in the next year because I’m focusing now on only the networks that work for me: WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook. If I add any other network to my game this year, it will be Tumblr, because Tumblr seems to like my photos, and I know quite a few people with accounts over there.

3. Part Time Monster developed its content focus and a clean look fairly quickly. Sourcerer has taken longer, and it’s still very much a work in progress. Now that we’ve settled on pop culture all the time here and I’ve committed to a redesign, we should be able to stabilize Sourcerer in the next year as long as we can keep the contributions coming.

4. If you discover either of my blogs, it is impossible to not also discover Part Time Monster if you take even a second to explore. But if you go and look at Part Time Monster, you will see that my blogs are just two more links on the blogroll. And the Monster shares a lot of my social media, but I don’t share Diana’s. At some point we may reorganize a bit and see what the Monster can do for Sourcerer, but as long as we’re neck-in-neck, it’s not worth the effort. One of us has to break out before we can do more than we are already doing to help each other.

The question I am asking myself now is this. If we’d just started one blog and posted there three times per day for a year, would we be further along in terms of traffic and network right now? I go back and forth on it, and it would take a whole other post to unpack the reasons we might or might not be.

Everyone who has contributed, read, and commented here has had a part in making this a rewarding and memorable year in the blogosphere for me. I hope this post is helpful, or at least interesting. I’m not the most successful blogger you’ll ever meet, but I am happy with the progress I’ve made since last November. This has been by far my most successful attempt at blogging, and I’ve failed many times. Thanks for making it worthwhile for me!