The BoingBoing post referencing this blog has pretty much played out. A Sunday in the middle of the summer is not going to be the best time to hit a major site like BoingBoing. Yesterday, three days after the post, the blog is down to 22 hits from BoingBoing related posts. That includes Neatorama and the thousands of sites that clone BoingBoing through their RSS feed. From here on it’s turtles all the way down.
I just had the memory of my late friend Stan sighing “Oh Well”.
I am still hammered by Stumbleupon.com, but the stumblers don’t hang around. The traffic on this site is about triple what it was three months ago, but none of it is important traffic. The traffic from has only grown slowly over the years, and local bumps don’t effect the long term trend.
In similar depressing news, I decided to find out how popular Shaun’s Freezine wound up. I tried Google, Bing, Technorati and Alexa only to discover that there were only three sites giving Freezine any traffic. This site (cthreepo.com) was the main one. I mentioned Freezine multiple times and put a link to my story on about 4000 of my web pages. The Discussion board formerly know as John Shirley’s Board, was another major link to Freezine. I, Shaun and even John plugged Freezine on the Board multiple times.. John Shirley’s web page was the third. John’s blog shows considerably less traffic than mine on Alexa et al, which shows I’m better at SEO and web promotion, even if Shirley is a much better writer. I doubt if there was significant traffic from John’s blog to Freezine. There was brief mention on a few blogs, but I checked a few and they had very low Google page ranks and probably did not send any traffic. Facebook probably sent some traffic, but I can’t measure that.
Freezine was BoingBoinged too, but it was a Friday in mid July, which was probably just as bad a day as Sunday. Believe it or not, most people surf the web at work. People don’t surf on weekends because there are more interesting things to do. I estimate that fewer than 500 people read part of Freezine and a fraction of that, probably less than 50, read my story. Sigh.
I don’t know what I wanted to accomplish by placing a story at Freezine. I hoped to get my name associated with a better class of writers (an oxymoron if there ever was one). It is disappointing to be pretty much ignored.
One Comment
Man, I hear ya, Keith. The only consolation is, I am trying to create the Freezine’s format as a “spool” of stories winding up around the central hub of a wheel – -that is, I hope to continue promoting the individual stories from the Freezine, with their respective links, as we continue.
I have “the secret weapon” still working on his next novel — for the Freezine. Believe it or not – this is a NY Times Best Selling Author – and he is very excited about what I’m doing with the Freezine, and has graciously sent me the outline for his dark fantasy novella, which he should be midway thru writing at this time. If things are going on time and/or ahead of schedule for him, there’s a chance his story would appear in the next, MAY, issue.
I don’t know for certain how he is progressing with the writing of the chapters. He wants to present it as a daily serialization. I’m not at liberty to reveal who this secret weapon is. What I’m suggesting is, there is still hope for the Freezine to attract more readers and attention, in particular from the association with this extremely well known author.
All the stories have their own respective url addys (of course) and new authors will always be added to the Drop -Down menu; thus preserving original authors (such as yourself) up higher on that list, for all to see as they browse through it. I am hoping this will keep the “older” authors and stories “perpetually refreshing” themselves, so to speak.
You are most certainly welcome to contribute additional stories–to become a “regular”, as John, David, Johnny, and now even Adam Bolivar and Vince Daemon have become. I think if we keep adding additional layers to this archive of stories–eventually, we’ll hit a ‘breaking point’ in overall exposure and readership. Especially when more authors, both unknown and known, deign to submit their own stories just to join the motley crew of assorted writers I’m collecting.
There’s still hope. . .
shaun