(3 min. read)
The oldest post on Red Planet Dust is dated Februari 6, 2013. This post will constitute the 125th in a very divers row, just 3 weeks shy of the first anniversary of Red Planet Dust.
When I first started blogging in Februari of 2013 I started with a clean sheet, an open mind and without any specific goals as stated in my first “Meta on Blog” post:
I want to paraphrase Semler: I have no specific goal or target with Red Planet Dust other then to just see where it brings me and hopefully my audience.
Later on I posted a more elaborate view on my experiences: Meta on Blogging via Red Planet Dust or how to defeat the blogs’ timeline Much of that post still holds today.
Last year my blogging – as was my professional life – was basically split in two parts. During the second half of the year my projects did not give me the breathing space, nor the agenda flexibility, to structurally post at Red Planet Dust. As a direct consequence my blog was left barren.
Unfortunately this also coincided with the inability to make any progress on “Collaborability” as a subject. With the New Year I have been able to pick up where I left both with my blog as with Collaborability.
Even though it is not my aim to attract as much traffic as possible at all and I do not have a direct commercial reason to maintain the blog other then to keep on challenging myself to understand today’s realities as a business consultant (and to explore collaborability in all of its whit) I like it when visitors are taking the trouble of reading my posts. I sometimes have to remind myself to keep my eyes on the ball and not to let me be distracted by the visitor stats.
Analysing the traffic to RPD I see a shift of visiting habits over time. Initially a lot of traffic was originated from Linkedin. Since some time though most traffic is drawn by the subjects themselves. Just as an example my isolated post on Payment Account Access Services (aka “PAAS” or “Access to the Account”) is the most visited individual post (2,5%). A subject like bitcoin has attracted over 25% of all direct hits. Also interesting to note is that until today the the blog is visited from 57 countries, 33% of all direct page hits are from visitors outside of the Netherlands.
Even with a lack of new posts the volume of visitors per month was only half of the ones when I was still posting regularly. I contribute this to the high (hyped) interest in Bitcoin and the like.
At the same time I see more and more visitors starting at the Blog page itself. To me that is interesting for these visitors obviously check without a specific search at Google leading them there or after being alerted by a LinkedIn feed that a new post has been published.
In the daily stats I have seen visitors navigating through various posts on a specific topic. To me the Blog format brings flexibility, but it comes at the expense of easily finding interesting posts by visitors. Trying to beat the blogs timeline setup I have come up with landing pages for Crypto-currency , SEPA and Collaborability as to better facilitate “topical reading”. (NB graphical links are provided as well).
When reading interesting articles I sometimes link to them in a post. But more often I link (“flip”) the article in my Red Planet Dust Flipboard magazine. This Magazine holds all the posts I create at Red Planet Dust (NB this was the main aim at first to find a broader audience for my material). I now provide a direct link to my magazine at Flipboard where I “flip” interesting articles from all over the web. I do not flip trivial articles and it can be seen as a list of “recommended reading on the web”.
Let’s see what the coming period will bring.