With starting Red Planet Dust I had multiple objectives but without having a clear goal or format in mind. One of my objectives was to gain first hand experience to what publishing on the web is about. My initial thoughts you can find here: part 1, part 2. With another two months of experience and Red Planet Dust becoming almost second nature to me it is time to reflect a little on the development of the blog.

I am really enjoying the trail I am on; the end is not in sight. I have been able, without any problems actually, to post almost on a daily basis. This is not a goal in it self but to me proof of a endeavour worthwhile.

Twitter has only proved to be useful as a delivery mechanism to Flipboard, for the rest it has been totally useless so far: it does not bring in visitors to RDP, I do not get new Twitter followers either. Even with a small group I “follow” my self I hardly see any value in ploughing through all these tweets, when will I ever click on a link there? I had trouble seeing the relevance of twitter before RDP came along, now I am convinced this is not my type of medium (at all).

Flipboard is a very nice app to find interesting stuff. Much of the articles I link to come from Flipboard. I have created a Flipboard magazine my self (not surprisingly called Red Planet Dust). Every post at RPD is posted there as well. Secondly I flip interesting articles there. I will now start to cross post from the magazine to my blog, for some of these articles are really worthwhile for my audience to read/view.

The Weekly digest and mailing list is a service that behaves as a two edged sword. On the one hand one can easily push the latest excerpts from the latest posts – Mailchimp is a truly powerful tool – to people that have indicated to be interested, at the other hand the report function can be devastating for your peace of mind. You can exactly see who opened it, how many times a link was clicked etc. In my case most of the people on the list are well known to me so if they ignore the weekly digest it is not “free of value”. It is nice to see high opening ratios but it hurts when people you know don’t open the digest. Somebody stopped the weekly mailing list – I have never met the guy in my life – prooved very draining on my motivation and energy. It is not a lot of work to send out a digest mail but still it has to be done and the reporting function is addictive. The weekly frequency is too high anyway. All in all I have decided to stop with the weekly digests. I will send out a last one to announce the demise of the digests.

How to defeat the timeline? The biggest challenge is how to make the knowledge and insights available at RPD accessible to the visitor in a last-in first-out time line dominated blog. The last published post builds on previous ones. Links to relevant previous posts are provided but they are not used that much, as I can see from my Jetpack analytical tool. During a business discussion with a former colleague today going over a slide deck in preparation of a big payments conference I heard my self repeatedly say: “just read my post on this issue…” But how is he to find the right posts?

Some measures I have been taking so far to circumvent the timeline restrictions:

  • I have been clustering posts (and moderating them) creating downloadable pdf articles. I will add a menu item where these can be downloaded.
  • Listing the related posts (Part 1, 2, 3 etc) in every related post. (e.g. “my take on strategy”.)
  • Updating older posts when relevant, even though this is not visible directly to the visitor. I will see if I can create a menu list with posts that have been recently updated.
  • Every two weeks I will create a post summarising a list of interesting articles linked to RPD posts or “flipped” to Flipboard. I come across articles and videos that are truly worthwhile reading. Now they are often lost behind a little link in a post.

Reactions via the blog to individual posts are few. When I started out I decided very consciously to not include the possibility to give reactions to posts in the blog. After some visitors asked me about it to give it a try I did out of curiosity. But it has proved me right; comments at RPD do not work. Why? My content is not that easy to react on I guess.. And most people are expecting people frequenting my blog that they might know, this holds them back as well. People find it difficult to give feedback even when asked. For discussions the blog timeline is not a good environment, but I do not want to create a discussion forum. Last but not least, RPD is not a high traffic blog. I have stopped the comments option.

The Categories and Tags are a way to delve into the posts. I need to restructure them to better reflect the type of content RPD contains.

The use of English earlier on after starting in Dutch has been a success in my view. Most of my visitors are (still?) from the Netherlands but visitors are coming from 35 countries by now. I have been translating older posts when I linked to them in a new one.

Traffic is slowly but surely getting higher over time. My analytics tool (Jetpack analytics in WordPress) has only limited functionality and has obvious limitations in counting views per post, let alone unique visitors. An attractive post title does do miracles for hits but also at days or even weeks I do not post traffic continues to flow to the side. The posts and pages most visited since starting Red Planet Dust are the general Blog page, the archives page and the company profile (interesting side effect). The first single post with the most hits after these high hitters is about Payment Account Access Services, which is predominantly reached via Google search. SEPA related subjects also score relatively high.

My posts have the tendency to get longer and longer…