I've noticed that, if people come to a particular page of this blog following a link, there is a truly terrible level of discovery for the rest of the blog...
Witness:
24,822 visits to my most recent two blog posts in the past 24 hours and ... 55 visits to my 3rd most recent. The two were linked on social media and got traction. The hits on the third indicate that perhaps a third of a percent of visitors have looked past the page that they landed on.
So, here, to help you find other content on the blog that has proven popular in the past are my 10 most visited pages (the ones that have no SPFBO content at least):
Grimdark. We're Nailing It Down!
The Biggest Fantasy Debuts In The Past Decade
The World's Best Selling Fantasy Books
My attempts to get sense from KDP
Writing on the numerical knife-edge.
No, stealing a book is not the same as borrowing from a library.
Which is my most successful trilogy?
Page 1 critique: Wizard's First Rule, by Terry Goodkind.
The extraordinary struggle to be heard.
Hi Mark! I'm the one that posted the results onto reddit, which got a (frankly) overwhelming amount of engagement. As of posting this, it's nearly at 300k views, with a roughly 0.1% comment rate. That you appear to have had a 5-10% clickthrough rate to your blog in comparison I'd say is really positive! Probably the interactive nature of the premise, and that AI is such a hot topic, and a divisive one. Having a second clickthrough rate to the rest of your blog at a higher rate than engagement with the original post suggests people were definitely engaged.
ReplyDeleteMy take on the organisational/layout/ease of navigation is that having the rest of the blog archive collapse by date makes it way harder to find content I'd actually resonate with. Is there a way to group blog posts by theme/subject matter? For instance, from this post, I was most interested in your science/magic post, and your Terry Goodkind first page one. The Terry Goodkind one was easy because you linked it for me, but the science/magic one, I couldn't be bothered to click through individual months/dates to find it, so I ended up having to click away from the post, google it, and then come back through to your blog that way around. I doubt anyone else is making that much effort, and they certainly won't be if they don't know it's there. I imagine motivation for clicking through various dates of your blog in the hopes of finding something that piques interest is vanishingly low - but of the most recent three, because the titles appear on the side, if the title sparks interest we can easily click through.
Food for thought? I don't know. Can that navigation bar even be changed from date formats? Either way, thanks for the recent discussion/test set-up, it was sobering and I've learned a lot from it.