Now that the month of June is in the rear view mirror, I'm finally getting around to doing the follow up post talking about the experience. Yay!?

Content Overview

While I would have liked to include some longer short stories, overall I'm pretty happy with the variety of my posts. Most of it was written right before publishing to the site, the exceptions being a story I wrote in 1985 in elementary school, a poem from college, a short story from almost a decade ago, and finally a poem from late last year (which was my 2nd post of the month; by the end of the month it was faster to write a random short story than it was to try to find older works that I felt comfortable sharing).

• Poems: 8
• Short stories: 10
• Non-fiction: 4
• Recap/list: 4
• Other: 4

Viewing Stats

I have to admit I was hoping for some insight into my readers by doing the experiment: what type of posts are most popular, does the timing of the post matter, where are my readers coming from, etc. For the raw numbers I've been comparing and contrasting numerous sources. I use Google Analytics, so a lot of the breakdown will come from there. However, since I automate my posts via WordPress, it's a little easier using them for specific post views (with sanity checks against the other sources). Lastly, I'll be using some direct server log tools to check for non-javascript folks (if any).

Top three viewed posts were my running recap, a poem from college, and my music list. About half of the posts had very few views (excluding computers; they'll always love me).

Top liked posts were my running recap and the story I wrote in grade school. 14 posts had zero likes (including the poem in top 3 viewed). 5 had multiple likes.

I couldn't find any correlation with when I posted an entry (that is, time of day) with its popularity (either likes or views). But, just to recap: I'm a night owl, so most of them were done close to midnight (and one after for the next day). Only a few were in the afternoon, but a decent number were in the evening; enough to say I'll post whenever I consider something done, and not try to target a given time.

Day of week is a bit more interesting, but a smaller sample size so I'm not putting a ton of weight on it. My two most viewed posts were both done late on Monday, but so was one of my least viewed posts. In mid-week, basically nothing seemed to get a lot of views (the grade school story being the lone exception).

Unsurprisingly, Facebook was the biggest source of readers (although some are masked by going through the WordPress link; I might post directly instead of automating it). The second biggest chunk came from email and RSS subscriptions. A few came from Twitter, Google search, or directly. And one from Bing!

Reviewing the choice of tech used by one's viewing audience is a fun exercise. Desktop had a strong majority (64%), with tablets being surprisingly low (2%) and mobile filling the middle. Most folks have iPhones (84%) with the rest being Android (long live my Nexus 5! Seriously. I don't feel like buying a new phone yet). Chrome has the majority of browser share (60%) and thankfully IE is under 2%. Safari is 2nd most popular (see mobile use) with Firefox being the least of the most (aka they're single digits, but more than double IE!). Windows takes the cake for OSs at 58%. Somehow there are more Linux users than Mac, which I find really funny.

Demographics aren't surprising; as you'd expect from everything above, they largely match my friends list on Facebook. Local towns and places with multiple friends and family top the charts.

About a quarter of users hit the site one a week, with a little over half hitting it once. Or not. I'm not sure I'm reading that chart correctly. And it's google so there's no help on screen. Anyway, a separate chart tells me that 78% of my traffic are returning visitors. Good? Bad? Small sample size! Perhaps I should compare/contrast with other periods!

May was basically a dead month. I did have one post, but aside from that almost no human traffic (just bots memorizing content). Last June was a bit better, so I'll use that one. Only a slight uptick in users, but a large increase in sessions, views, and returning visitors (all expected). Part of the explanation might be that half my traffic wasn't English (oops; I fixed a google setting last summer, although rather than send me english speakers it now usually send me none! yay?).

Conclusion

The experiment was partly successful and partly not. It has gotten me to more consistently write, so I have to continue getting things down on paper. My goal throughout has been to get together a short story book (and probably another poetry one), so at least the production side of things has me less concerned than before. The less-than-successful part is the lack of overall traffic. Combining various sources (email lists, RSS, facebook, and twitter) the average post gets well below 1% of page views, which is not good at all. I'll need to consider other avenues, including a separate FB page just for writing (as their business pages give additional tools, since the point is for them to take your money) and perhaps advertising on google. I haven't done much in writing forums or sites like reddit, either. I'm open to suggestions.