Toyestermorrow (that SSW progress report I promised)
The days just keep flying by, don’t they? It seems like just yesterday I promised to post a progress report on how Silent Sound Waves has been doing. Which is of course why I am posting it today. To get straight to the point, SSW has been doing quite alright since we started posting regularly back in November.
Visitor numbers have shown a healthy growth since then, with average visitors per day growing somewhere between 50% to 80% during each of these months. Pageviews are up by almost the same, which might be a tad bit worrying as the number of pageviews per visitor is a bit low, but I’m attributing that mostly to social media visits, that tend to have a low conversion rate. I will touch on this later in the post.
As it stands right now, I’m estimating that we have a core audience of around 100 - 200 people that visit the blog every day, or at least when post updates. Our subscribed readers can probably be added to this number, but this is sadly as low as only 30 - 40 people. My suspicions that it would be a lot harder to convert readers into RSS subscribers for a less tech savvy audience were certainly warranted.
The rest of the visitors are readers that find a certain post or article from certain social media sites, and these do, like I mentioned, convert quite poorly in my experience. On several occasions over the past two months we’ve had over 1.000 unique visitors per day, but the return rates are pretty lousy on those that come from social media outlets like StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx and similar. Most of our return visits find us through search engines, other music blogs or music forums, which when you think about it makes sense.
Since we entered 2009 I have set a goal of posting at least 4 posts per week, and this has gone pretty well. As far as I can recollect, it’s only been one week we had less, and we had 3 that week, and the other weeks we’ve mostly been up to five.
In addition to me, there is one writer posting actively on the site, Matt, and he has done a great job and churned out some quality reviews and articles. Hopefully he will be able to keep at it, and at the same time I am looking actively for more writers. This is because I am hoping to lessen the posting (or at least the reviewing) load on myself, and be able to spend more time focusing on the promotional side of things. I have some great ideas, but most are pretty time consuming and I need to really sit down and spend a few hours to get any of them rolling. Will come back and share these ideas and the results in future posts, as soon as I actually get around to executing them.
The main priority right now is to get a more rigid posting schedule in place, and I am aiming at five posts per week, but I have realized that for this to happen I will need to have at least two posts contributed by other writers. I have one that will hopefully come through, and if I can recruit two others on top of him, I think we’ll have a good shot of that happening. To improve communication between us and make the co-ordination of the writers easier for myself I am currently setting up a staff forum. If I can get the writers to use it actively and participate it, I think it will be a great asset. As always, I’ll be evaluating the effects of this publicly here on my personal blog.
There are probably a thousand things I forgot to mention, but one thing that I will bring up before ending this already oversized post is a new column I just introduced. It’s called “In-the-News”, and you can see an example of it here. As we will never be able to keep up with some of the bigger blogs on news reporting, I am instead introducing a bi-weekly round-up of things that I found interesting. Still not a hundred percent convinced on this, and I haven’t really had any feedback on it, positive or negative, so far. My fear is that it falls a little outside of our “core-focus” as it is a tad bit tabloid (at least the first one), but I will give it a couple of weeks to see what the response is like, and whether or not the readers appreciate it. Feel free to let me know what you think!