It’s my 300th post! Let’s throw a party!
Wait. What’s that little asterisk doing there? Shit. This means I’m doing more than throwing a party, doesn’t it.
I track my site analytics obsessively. It’s something I’ve done since the very first blog I had when I was 17. I’ve gotten much better tools and analytic programs to use in the time since then, but it’s a long-standing obsession I’ve had. When a blog platform has good analytics, it makes my heart sing. As an aside story to show how much this matters to me, I was considering moving this site to SquareSpace in early 2018. I love their user interface and quite enjoyed the site building experience their software provided. That said, I chose not to make the move because SquareSpace didn’t allow me to upload historical analytical data for my site1. Analytics matter to me a ton is my point.
That’s part of why it pains me a bit personally when I directly do something that impacts my analytics. If something weird happens where bot traffic is counted as real traffic or real comments end up in my spam, that’s all annoying, but fine. But I make conscious efforts to avoid making any sort of measurable direct impact to my own analytics. Beyond that, the past six months or so have been fantastic for the growth of my blog traffic and (to a lesser extent) comments and subscriptions. This means that trends in my data have become easier to identify, particularly when it comes to the type of content those reading my blog like to read.
In looking through my data for February 2019, I noticed that every single post in my top ten visited posts feel into one of two categories — video game posts or writing posts. The video game category is pretty straight forward, as I write a good bit about Fire Emblem and Pokemon. The writing category is a bit broader, though the traffic does tend to come from writing advice posts I write, as well as updates regarding my own works in progress.
I got to digging some more and noticed that this trend has been going on for a while now. In fact, since February 2018, there has only been one month where every single one of my top ten posts didn’t fall under my video games, writing, or business categories. That month was November 2018, where five of my top ten posts didn’t belong to any of these categories. This was just as much poor categorization as anything else on my part, as four of those five posts were about NaNoWriMo2.
Last year, I wrote about needing direction on my blog. I did a pretty large redesign, got some new logos from the talented Tim Kilkenny, and did a massive overhaul of my freelancing related pages. That said, I never really made any sort of change in direction on my blog. I didn’t totally know what I wanted to do, nor did I completely know what I wanted to be writing about on a week-to-week basis. Now, I think I’ve finally found that.
Going forward, the vast majority of my blog posts will focus on one of three categories.
- Video games: This category will be similar to what I do for video games now — a Nintendo-focused series of posts primarily based around theorycrafting, game reviews, and game analysis. I’ll likely devote most of the posts I write in this category to the Pokemon and Fire Emblem franchises, though I’ll do the occasional post about other games here and there3.
- Business/Finance: This category will likely see the most change going forward, having less of a focus on the personal business posts I’ve written in the past. Instead, I’ll generally style my business and finance posts similar to the advice style posts I’ve done in the past, such as my fallacies of training post.
- Writing: This category will include updates on my work in progress4, various short stories I’ll write here and there, advice posts for writers and editors, and any new posts I do for my #NaNoWriMoTips series in November.
Those categories, perhaps not shockingly, are the same three categories that have made up the vast majority of my traffic over the past year. There will also be a fourth group of posts that you’ll see occasionally. I’m tentatively classifying these as miscellaneous posts in my head. The miscellaneous posts will include any site news related posts (such as this one as well as my goal updates), random one-off posts that I had pre-scheduled prior to this announcement5, and the occasional humor post that isn’t directly related to one of the categories above (think the internet recipe parody posts). There may still be the occasional book review post, as I do have writer friends whose work I’d like to help publicize, though I’ll touch on that more in a moment.
With all that in mind, I’ve already started archiving any past posts that don’t fit one of the above categories in some capacity. Though I’m not exactly sure to what extent I’ll end up archiving, what it will do is to throw my post count off. Even though this is technically my 300th post, you’ll likely see far fewer results on the blog as a result of this archiving process. In my initial estimate, I’m thinking the blog post count will be in the 175-200 post range once I’m done with clean up, though that number could fluctuate anywhere from 150-2256.
I’ll also be doing a good bit of clean up on my various non-post site pages, though there won’t be as much archiving going on there. Instead, I’ll be revamping the pages related to me, as well as creating a new page aimed at publicizing the works of those who are friends of the site or whose work I support in some capacity. Since this post will be going up in late March, I’m going to say that my hope is to have said page cleanup and creation done by the end of April.
I want to take a moment to thank those of you who have stuck with me and supported me since I launched this blog endeavor new in 2016, including those of you who followed me over from my old site and have been reading my writing since 2012 or earlier. For those who are new, welcome and/or hi. I hope to see you around the comments.
