Thomas B.
After a bit more than a year of blogging, here’s what sells according to various metrics.
First, my WordPress stats module.
Steampunk sells, specifically my portable turntable. The genre has now grown so mainstream that everyone and their mother is looking for advice or examples of crafting projects. I am no steampunk fan, but it does stroke my ego that my most visited post is about something I created and not a article on somebody else’s work.
The second one is my Solmukohta recap, which confirms that people who were at an event want to read about it (often to see whether they’re mentioned), and I guess people who weren’t also want to to see what they missed. Solmukohta was a large, international event featuring highly connected people, but even my recap of GN’Idée, the little Swiss Solmukohta attended by 60 francophones is also among my top 5 posts. So yeah, real life events do sell.
Finally, drama sells: my 3rd most visited post is a rant about the French tabletop rpg federation and my love-hate relationship with it. This is also my highest-ranking French post, but overall, English-language posts sell much better.
Interestingly the steampunk post is the only one I actively marketed in dedicated forums, both English and French speaking and for which keywords searched actually drove traffic. All the other posts that made an impact were forwarded, reposted or commented by people with larger audiences than myself, often because they’ve written books on the topic (e.g. larp scholars like Sarah Lynne Bowman or Lizzie Stark) or are game designers and very active bloggers like Stéphane “Alias” Gallay. Which tells me if I want a larger audience I’d better get going and publish something again.
As a final comment on keywords, my article on rpgs in France attracted of lot of people looking for S&M dungeons in Paris and my piece on Jacques Brel seems to have caught the eye of kinky water sports enthusiasts rather than of Belgian chansonophiles.
Look at me hanging out with bigwigs in the 50s!
Klout is a measure of noise you make on social networks. Not about how good or interesting the content you post is, but about how often you post and how often people comment on it. At first it made me very sad, as during an experiment my online, creative persona had a much lower klout that my regular “I’m coming to your party” and “look a funny photo I took on the train today” identity. But for Klout, a one-liner or a shocking picture if often much more effective than a well-researched, well-written article. Sad, but such is the rule of ratings I guess, and I keep retesting it whenever I post or do not post content. My highest klout was 48 after Solmukohta, and it keeps going down whenever I stop being active. The fact that high-klout individuals get some IRL perks really makes me think I live in the world of Eclipse:Phase with its online rep currency, yay singularity!
I originally joined it to see larp pictures that weren’t anywhere else. I stayed on because it was the best way to stay aware of local events and maintain a non-work-related social life. Now I use it to stay in touch with interesting people I meet around the world. Main problem is the stupid games and the children photos at various stages of development. But a necessary evil if I want to make an impact.
I doubted the relevance of it and then saw the light: a clean, uncluttered interface, lot of gamers I knew or authors whose work I respected, no photos of babies, no online games and to boot, a badass referencing in Google searches that drives my posts high on results pages. I’ll definitely stay for all those.
I failed at Twitter. The instant, short, impulsive fleetingness of it all just does not fit my lifestyle. I’ll forward things there in the future, but no more attempts at getting followers.
I’m all about giving a tip for great online content. Unfortunately, not enough people use it, and very often I just don’t dig enough what I see on a post with a flattr button to actually hit it. I give about 2 euros per month and for the first time I received more than this last month. It’s a bit of an inbreeding system since I know many of my flattrers, but I’m quite happy that a post I wrote about real salaries in the French tabletop rpg business was seen as worth a few euros by some random readers I don’t know. This is an example of the serious, researched writing I mentioned earlier. Not a big motivator to write more like this, but comforting to know some people actually do care.
Gaming the Klout: first peak you see is from photos from a steampunk gathering, the second from my contribution to a challenge on thespiral.eu, then the flat line is regular postings of noise on social networks. None of it is from written blog posts. Sobering, I tell you.
So what next?
I am not ready to only post shocking things or mainstream things to attract followers. I will keep ranting when I need to rant, and commenting on what I believe deserves advertising or debriefing. But as this is my own personal online space, there will still be posts about French hip-hop or the 18th century. Few people care about them, but they’re also part of what makes me Thomas B.
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