Friday, May 30, 2014

My blog is tanking. Help me figure out why.

This capsizing ship makes an unfortunately apt metaphor for my blog.

This is a distress call. 

Relax. It's nothing important. My blog is just in poor health, and I have no idea why. I'm very proud of the work I've done on Dead 2 Rights, and I think that some of the best articles in the blog's history have appeared here within the last year. I don't post nearly as often as I used to, but that's because most of the pieces I do for D2R these days are longer and require more research. An ungodly amount of time and effort has gone into Ed Wood Wednesdays, for instance. 

The actual, depressing stats for my blog. Note the steep decline at the right.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I love writing and researching, and this blog gives me a forum in which I can delve into topics which I find interesting. I'm concerned, though, about my readership numbers, which have spiraled downward rapidly and alarmingly in 2014. New articles generate very little traffic, and older ones just aren't attracting page views the way they once did. 

Sometimes, it seems like everything I post here dies a miserable, lonely death. This blog has become the equivalent of a tree falling in the forest when no one is around to hear it. Many times, I've decided against writing something for D2R because I know that virtually no one will read it. It's a downer to spend hours on something, only to be rewarded with a dozen or so page views. Folks, I really want to turn this around. I already promote this blog on every kind of social media known to civilized man, and I feel intensely guilty about that. I hate bothering people and jamming up their news feeds. That's what you have to do to get eyeballs in 2014. 

But apparently, I'm still doing something wrong. Heck if I know what. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them. Rest assured, I'm going to keep writing this blog either way. It would be nice to have an actual audience, though.