Six years old today – State of the Blog

Another year has passed and of Dice and Dragons has reached the age of six – Happy Birthday!

One of the nice things about birthdays is that they come every year and you can make them as special or as bland as you want. Over the last six years I’ve mentioned this milestone on occasion, usually with little fanfare and more often than not without the cake. So this year I’ve decided to make it into something of an important item and will now use the occasion for an annual State of the Blog post which will include not only blog related items but my own RPG goals as well.

Last year I mentioned some goals that I for set for myself to strive and I think it’s an appropriate time to take a look at how I did, share some of the traffic data I’ve collected over the last 12 months, and set some new goals.

Last year’s goals:

1. Game more – I set a goal of having 12 sessions of gaming in 2011 as my group has been out of the RPG arena for a while and more into card and board games. Unfortuately I missed the mark on this one and there are a number of reasons for this but I think the single biggest is that no one really took the ownership of the GM chair. I was planning to sit in that chair again in 2011 but when it came time what I had planned didn’t really fit the wants and needs of the group so it fizzled after a mere three sessions. Of note is I did get a single session in with my kids this year to start their RPG education, I’ll count that as an unplanned high point. I’ll be adding this goal again in 2012.
2. Post once a week – another miss. I’m not sure why but I have some ideas as to the cause of the famine of posts on this blog. I took a quick count and in total I posted just eight times (including this one) in the last year, not exactly a stellar performance. I could make any number of excuses but I won’t I’ll just say that only hitting 15% of the mark just won’t cut it.
3. Publish an eBook – okay, that makes it a perfect game as I missed on this one as well. To be honest while I did toy with a few ideas I never really settled on any of them and didn’t put my backside in the chair to do it.

The statistics:

As a lot of other sites do I have Google Analytics running to track traffic statistics so I can not only see how I’m doing but also give me some insight into what folks are looking at, how long they’re on the site, and be able to do some comparisons over time. For those that have been around the site for a while know that the site has changed domain homes three times and with each change the data was cleared and reset so I’m only looking at data from roughly July 1, 2009 when I announced that the blog was still alive and for the purposes of this posting I’m only including data from the last 12 months.

Total visits: 7,289

In the grand scheme of things that not a lot but considering that the blog had very few posts and shifted locations roughly six months prior to the data we’re looking at I think it’s off to a good start.

Pageviews: 11,238 (1.54/visit)

Again, I know that this is a relatively small number and overall I’m happy with it given my comments above. The figure I would like to definitely see improved is the number of page views per visit – there’s a lot of material on the blog and it would appear I need to do a better job of making it accessible.

Top five posts of the last 12 months

The last item I want to include in my review are the top five posts of the past year as I think it’ll be interesting to see how this list changes from year to year (if it changes at all).

1. Encounter Idea No. 2 – The Cat: This was the second posting I did in a series on encounters (sort of obvious from the title) and gathered 18% of the pageview traffic.
2. A Fighter, a Wizard and a Bard walk into a bar . . .: This was a posting I did in response to my first, and so far only, gaming session with my kids and sheds a little light on the experience. This post gathered 8.5% of the pageview traffic.
3. Encounter Idea No. 20 – The Undertaker: Another posting from the encounter series, this one pulled in 7.4% of the pageview traffic.
4. Build your campaign world with your players: This posting introduced an interesting cooperative system for building campaign worlds with a history and managed 6.8% of the pageview traffic.
5. Closing plot doors: Rounding out the top five is a short post that makes a simple suggestion of tracking things so you can close them. This short post pulled in a respectable 5% of the pageview traffic.

I will note two honorable mentions, the Encounter Ideas Page and the blog’s Home Page both managed enough traffic to be included in the top five but as I wanted it to be the top five posts they weren’t included in the above list.

So now that we’ve looked at how I did with last year’s goals and we’ve taken a snapshot of where the blog stands, it’s time to set some goals for the upcoming year.

Goals for 2012

1. Post more frequently – Yes, I know this was a goal for last year and with only eight post in the last 12 months (including this one) I think it’s safe to say I need to put it in front of me again. This year I will once again set the bar at 52 posts (one a week on average).
2. Game more frequently – Again a repeat goal but I think it’s important to put it up on the wall and this year do something about it. My group is interested in playing in more of a ‘sandbox’ style of campaign so that’s what I’m going to endevor to do – I just need to build it first. I’m going to again put this goal at 12 sessions.
3. Increase blog traffic by 10% – Last year I didn’t set a traffic related goal as I was only six months into this domain and still working my way along getting all the kinks worked out. This year I’m going to build upon last year’s numbers and shoot to bring the visitor count up to about 8,000 for the year.
4. Participate in a blog carnival – Every month the RPG community has a blog carnival where they pick a topic and everyone is invited to write up a posting on the topic. I have frequently looked at these topics and read some of the posts and feel that I should put a goal of participating in at least one this year.

Like last year I’m keeping the goal list small as life frequently gets in the way of what I’m trying to do and let’s face it, life is way more important than rolling some dice on the table (unless you get paid to do it).

Are you going (or have already set) goals for the upcoming year? Why not share a link or the goals themselves in the comments below.

May your dice roll well.