Over the past 30 days, I have posted on my blog at least once a day and I’ve been active on Twitter. I decided to blog each day for 30 days as a way to launch this website because my previous website (elizastopps.wordpress.com) had been inactive for a long time. In the past month, I also released two new books (one available for free on my newsletter and one is a pre-order for November) and updated my covers. I wanted to see how much change I could have on my platform in just one month. Could I boost sales (that had been dead for a while?) How many new followers on Twitter could I find? How many views could I get on my blog?
Most importantly, I wanted to know if I could do it for free (without paid advertising) and learn a little bit about who my audience is. I’m going to openly share this data with you. It’s not a brag, it’s a great increase from the 0% activity I had previously, but I’m not suddenly famous nor can I quit my day job. But it gives me some good data to use going forward. If you’re an author who is frustrated with their lack of growth on their platform, maybe you can learn something from this post!
How Did Daily Blogging Effect My Blog?
The first graph in the graphic above is from my blog. This website was a new launch, so prior to October 1st, my views were at 0. Throughout the month, I blogged in the following categories: Life as an Author, My Books, Books I Read, Writing, Publishing, and Marketing. I circled the three days that had the most views about in light green.
On October 14, I posted twice on my blog. The first was a post about Top 3 Submission Mistakes and the other was Leslie Kim #102 Pre-Order Announcement. The submission mistakes post was the most popular, without question. This is partly because my audience is mostly other writers and very few people have read my book series, so while there was some interest there, it wasn’t as universal. I only posted on Twitter twice that day, but both tweets did include links back to my blog. I think that is really important for directing traffic. On the day before, October 13, I had also posted twice. But they were about my word count goals and I didn’t have links to my website, so they didn’t do anything to help my views on my website. On the 9th, I posted 5 times on Twitter and that also didn’t do anything for my website. Now, that isn’t to say that those tweets weren’t more popular with my followers on Twitter.
On October 18, I posted once. That post was a worksheet for NaNoWriMo 2020 on Worldbuilding. I also tweeted 5 times on that day, and some of those had links to my website.
On October 22, I posted once. This is the one that kind of took me by surprise. I was just sharing a funny little bit about the movie Spaceballs and poking fun at my main character in the Leslie Kim Serials, whose spaceship was described by one reader as a flying motor home.
Did these spike in views have anything to do with SEO?
We’ve all been preached to about how much SEO can impact your views on your blog. Was that the case for me? Maybe. Using the Headline Analyzer that WordPress provides, the titles of my posts scored (out of 100): 68, 39, 64, and 48. A “good score” is between 40 and 60. So, almost all of these are good scores, but not great. I had other posts this month that did score above 70 using this analyzer, but they did not have as many views.
How Did This Effect Book Sales?
I’m not going to pretend that my books are ranking well. The truth is, I published Mythical Investigations in 2017 and have done very little to promote, advertise, or publish more in the series until this month. So, prior to October my sales were at 0. Because I have a new book coming out, I saw this as a great time to promote the first book in the series. It’s currently in KDP, so I used a Kindle Countdown Deal to make the first book free during the week of October 20-24. Perhaps this inflated the views on the Spaceballs post.
I also promoted the book on a few other websites to point them toward that Kindle Countdown Deal. So, while my book had been downloaded 0 times during September, it was downloaded 9 times during this week. That’s not a groundbreaking number, but it is a start.
How Did Daily Blogging Effect My Social Media Following?
I think the biggest benefit of daily blogging is that I was able to post original content each day instead of reposting the same article all week. I also made an effort to interact more with other people on Twitter (in a positive way) and with the #WritingCommunity. I had been inactive on Twitter for the year previous to this, so I did gain 265 followers during this month, which is great for me. I don’t do a ton of writer’s lifts or try any scammy methods of gaining thousands of followers quickly. And I’m not super worried about how many followers I have. That said, most of my views on my blog do come from people clicking links on social media. Without it, they wouldn’t even know my blog existed. So, yes this did effect my social media following. However, it is probably not the daily blogging that did it and it is more likely it was the regular interactions I had.
Who Is My Audience?
As a scifi author you might think I would have an audience mostly targeted at scifi readers. And that would probably be the smart thing to do. However, most of my “audience” that I interact with are other writers. Some might say that writers are readers. Buuuuut I don’t think many writers are buying other writer’s books on Twitter unless they get published with a major publishing house. So, if I’m not publishing nonfiction any time soon then my blog is probably not going to make a huge difference in my book sales. However, my blog is kind of it’s own beast. I am writing for other writers here.
That’s pretty much why I decided to make this blog post. I know I’m reaching other writers here and I know how frustrating it can be to pour in so much work to your blog and see so few results. Even if you gain a lot of readers, can you translate that to money? I think it is much harder to break out in the blog world today than it was ten years ago. But you don’t need to reach every reader, you only need to reach 1,000 of them.
Will I Blog Every Day Going Forward?
My plan right now is to post about 4 times a week. Eventually, I will probably move to a twice a week blog schedule but November is typically a busy one for me. I will be doing weekly updates on NaNoWriMo (join me over there! I’m @ejstopps!) and I have 4 author interviews planned AND I’m launching Leslie Kim #102: The Gnome Situation (you can pre-order it now!). So, I have a lot going on and I will be posting more often. Eventually, I will try to move to twice a week. Why? I have just heard from so many bloggers that twice a week is the magic number for blogs. So, why not try it?!
You won’t want to miss everything that is going on with my blog in November. To get weekly recaps of the posts, join my mailing list. You also get a free book. How awesome is that?
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