Unabashed

I read somewhere that 75% of blog visitors bounce away from the site within the first 30 seconds of arrival. For me, that stat is higher (this graph is for the month of April):

Wish I knew why. But at the same time I have around 10% who stay for longer than 15 minutes. To those of you who fall into that category, and who keep coming back: thanks. I like you. Overall, traffic was down from March to April. March was a monster month for Unabashed, raking in almost 300 individual users per day (86% of whom bounced without even settling for a full minute). For April, it was down to 196 (but 513 page views, so somebody’s sticking around). No, I don’t know why, but then I can’t explain why I get the number of visitors I do, either. They just started trickling in, and slowly but surely became what they are now.

So, if I was the CEO of a corporation, I’d be chewing the asses off my sales staff, telling the company to get a handle on churn, and I’d be trying to come up with a new pricing scheme and marketing campaign to get the ship righted. But then I’d be making $12.8 million per year, too. But… I’m just me, tapping out 8.6 posts per week and I don’t have a marketing campaign or sales staff, and I think it’s safe to say that any sort of pricing scheme above $0.00 would drive churn up to right around 100%. But I do have churn. 85.6% in the red. Ah, well, thank God I have my day job.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, churn, individual, Matt Mitchell, stats, traffic, Unabashed, unique, visitors

Interesting note, today I uploaded the picture of the Aurora Borealis to my Flickr account, and then made a post on the blog about it. As it ends up, that was my 200th picture uploaded into Flickr, and my 200th post on Unabashed, which is kind of freaky. As milestones, the Flickr one is dubious, because I only have a free account, and the free accounts are restricted to 200 pictures. So now my earliest pictures will not be visible unless I go through and delete some (since only the most recent 200 are viewable). Frankly, I didn’t know I was close to 200 pics. But 200 blog posts is significant: It was a goal for me to reach 200 pages of content with this blog. Some of the content is good, some bad, some popular, and some has never even been seen before that I know of. 

Now that I’ve reached my 200-post goal, I’m beginning to think long-term. This isn’t a money-making scheme. I don’t post advertisements and I don’t use Adsense. This is just a repository for things I find interesting, ruminations and a log of my path as a new writer. Links to sites I like, other blogs I read, stories I’ve written and/or other projects I’m working on. The only thing I had in mind when I started it, and that I maintain still today, is that I don’t want to give repetitious posts of content that’s already been covered by Boing Boing. I didn’t want to be a carbon copy of other writers who blog, and I didn’t want to post a lot of personal stuff. In those respects, I feel like I’m still right on target. For the future, I expect I’ll be building on what I’ve already done, but writing more ruminations, some longer articles. I don’t see myself posting any more or less than I do now, but I do see my word count increasing because I’m getting better at looking deeper into an idea that I was when I first started out. And I hope to be writing a lot more success stories in the publishing arena that I have in the past.

I hope you’ve been entertained, and I hope I’ll be able to entertain you further as the blog grows. Be seeing you.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Flickr, Matt Mitchell, Unabashed, writer

Okay, all my archives are finally in place, so past articles are available for your reading pleasure again (if you’re into that sort of thing). But–for some reason I lost some formatting in the transition, along with a few images. I’ve got 186 articles on this blog now, and I’ll start working through them gradually, fixing the formatting errors (they’ll still read, but, for example, apostrophes are now little weird blocks).

Unabashed is healthier than I thought it was, too, which is very encouraging. When I suffered the massive format failure when I was with Yahoo! Hosting, my Google Analytics stats dropped–in one day–from roughly 40 unique visitors (UVs) per day to 1. Yes: 1. Some days there were less than one–that being a big, fat, donut hole–and very rarely did they ever creep above the 1. I had no idea why it happened that way, but it continued even after I’d made the switch to Surpass Hosting, and I’ve really started trying to figure out why lately. Primarily because I know personally of at least ten folks per day who were looking at my blog. The stats just weren’t accurate. But along with switching to Surpass I gained a new stats analysis tool which was showing roughly the same results, and at that point I began thinking that I really must suck, that people hate me, and that I should pull the plug on the whole thing.

But (again, another but) then last night, just for giggles, I checked the stats for my root domain: mattmitchellfiction.com, without the subdomain /unabashed, and there I found all my missing little UVs. And even better, since my move to Surpass, my visits have increased. Since March 1st I’ve had 1749 UVs hitting 2264 pages. That’s a record around here. True, they’re not Scalzi numbers (whose are? Not many), but they’re respectable enough for me to be entirely content that at least I don’t suck, and pulling the plug might not be altogether necessary. Some of the traffic has come from Down in the Cellar, where my latest story has been published, but a lot of it just comes through Google and Yahoo! searches. For some reason a lot of people end up at my “Miraculous Coffee Entry.” I guess there are a lot of coffee lovers out there.

So, in response to this, and seeing that a lot more traffic comes through my root domain than I had previously supposed, I’ve revamped my front page with my little mascot friend “Viva the Beaver,” who I drew up about ten years ago. (He’s the little guy with the harpoon peeking out of the right hand column now). It’s not a very professional job, but it’s all I had in me to do last night, and, most importantly, it links to here, where the bulk of my ruminations reside. Check it out and let me know what you think, I would appreciate the feedback, whether good or bad.

So the state of the blog is good. Better than it’s ever been, really. And there are developments coming down the pipe that I hope you’ll enjoy.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, Matt Mitchell, stats, Unabashed