Blogging for Writers: Looking for Love in All the Wrong Bounce Rates
Just about any blogger eventually discovers the alluring world of site traffic tracking, whether it’s through Google Analytics, Site Meter, or lovely fresh Mint.
We wonder: what impact are we making out there? Who reads us?
Who likes us?
Now that’s one complicated question, and not always so easily answered. There are no little “like” graphs on your Wordpress.com stats dashboard. We can only infer—outside of honest confirmation from every single one of your visitors—whether people like your site or not.
At first, you might wonder if mere visit count is a direct-enough indicator of love. But these days, social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon can send you hundreds, even thousands, of hits—and they can all evaporate over a matter of days. So visit count isn’t sufficient enough of an answer.
Another measurement, frequently proposed as an answer to a blogger’s most troubling question, is what’s known as bounce rate.
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit one page of your site, and then disappear. The lower your bounce rate, the more people are sticking around to read more of your stuff during just a single visit. The higher your bounce rate, the less people like you—or so the wisdom runs.
The popularity of bounce rate as the answer stems in large part from the ease of its measurement, and the cleanness of its oracular nature: high bad, low good.
So is bounce rate the final answer? Many people act as though it is.
I’m here to tell you that it isn’t.
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Spontaneous Reviews: Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith
I’m musing on widening the focus of this blog, while at the same time keeping it entertaining.
That may not happen. Anyways, here’s Aito Nakamura and Nina Ten Review Star Wars, courtesy of the same mind that presented you with Arcady and Zene Review The Liar’s Diary.
And I really need to find more interesting header images for my reviews blog.
6 Pieces of Fiction Writing Advice Often Ignored
Writing fiction is hard. Bringing to life a series of manufactured events with pretend people in a world that only exists in your head—it’s a kind of mental origami that takes years to master.
Just about any beginning writer eventually figures that bit out. And figures out that they need to learn at least some of the basics somewhere. The net seems the perfect place. Doesn’t it? There are any number of web pages, blogs, and forums to read about this sort of stuff.
The problem is, much as I love the net, and much as there are great sites about writing, a writer needs more than that to grow quickly, so that their first stories will suck less and suck for a shorter period of time.
6 Months of Blogging: A Spontaneous Retrospective and Look at Things to Come
Update: Blade Off the Feather showed up as truncated. That’s been fixed, so now it actually is a story.
Back to your scheduled blog entry.
Life is change.
Spontaneous Derivation was born on October 10th, 2007 with a most innocuous post.
Since the first retrospective 3 months ago, Sd has gone through four redesigns, switched from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress, been Stumbled a few times, ended up on Entrecard’s main help page, and put through all manner and form of WordPress plugins.
And through all that, Spontaneous Derivation gained an actual focus for the first time: blogging as a writing form. Although the tag line is much more amusing (and more accurate, since Bein’ Like Totally SeRIouz is something I have a hard time keeping up).
Recently, I was tagged by the good Unfocused Life for the “Six Things About Me” meme. But since I’ve already got an entire page blathering about myself, I’ve decided to instead highlight six milestone articles (or series) I’ve written in these past three-and-some months. Each represents one big step in my development as a writer and blogger.
And while I’m indulging in some reminiscing, you’ll also get a preview of content to come.
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A Personal Discovery of Authority
Sectioned off from Bringing Focus to Your Blog by Discovering Your Inner Authority.
Sometimes your authority won’t be quite what you originally set out for it to be.
Originally I wanted to write about writing. Like every single other writer out there, published or not, as I found out.
But as of this time, I don’t know anything about professional writing. Nor do I know anything about fiction writing, or non-fiction writing, much less publishing or even the market. I couldn’t write about those subjects with the detail and depth that would give value to my readers, value that wasn’t better found somewhere else. I can’t pretend to have knowledge that I don’t have.
So what could I give to my potential readers?
