March was an interesting month where I’ve focused a lot more on building up my number of game reviews while also working out where I want to spend time promoting my content outside of Steem.
Google Analytics
With Steemit having nothing to try and understand traffic to my content there are two places I’ve turned to that both have their own Google Analytic page. First the select content I post using the Engrave platform that uses the blockchain and has Steemconnect over there on my site EnjarGames. Followed by my curator page on the Steam platform Enjar Games.
Engrave
While I won’t post every single gaming post I create over there since there are a few things to consider when it comes to SEO and keeping someone on the site. Is this going to be something someone could find on a search engine? How likely would it be that someone would run a search and find it? Would I be willing to invest time into updating it to make it more relevant and active a year from now? Along with some other stuff regarding content. There are many different ways I might consider a piece to be over there or just remain on my Steemit version.
Page Views
Page views were down by 110 this month. I expect things to go sideways or even down for a few more months. When you do something new in life everyone around you tends to be “that’s cool let me check it out.” As time progresses that new feeling wears off and people are just not checking in as it’s not something new to look at. I also had more users this month so I can only suspect a few of my friends/associates/supporters went around to a number of pages just checking things out or showing support in February. With most of my users being considered “new” in March.
In the future when their more data to plot I’ll make charts to compare to different months. Right now there just very little data to go on. Also not sure what frequency if any I will be making a post like this.
Mobile Users
I have had a couple of mobile users and it appears they are just bouncing right out of the site. My content itself is written mostly around PC games. It’s not a video, it’s very long articles filled with in-game screenshots showcasing what I’m talking about.
I’ve in no way tried to optimize or create my content in a different way to create a good experience for those on weaker devices like smartphones. The screenshots are themselves scaled down but I’ve always done that for my content on Steem so pages are not taking forever to load and how they were getting displaced anyways. Messing with compression rates might be something I toy around with in the future. For now that just another thing that adds even more time into content creation with no short term pay off. Since these users are only 2.4% of my total viewers.
Big Spikes
We can see those big spikes at the end in my impressions from google searches. I invested a lot of time into a single post that was going to be a cornerstone. I already have a lot of content on Path of Exile so creating something extra special was going do something wondering if I put in the time. Between playing Path of Exile to gain the knowledge and first-hand experience I wanted. Along with rewriting the article a number of times for SEO, and promoting it. I spent over 150 hours over a couple of weeks. The result was Synthesis League Overview.
At this point, I can only speculate a few things since it also takes a long time for data to roll in. I knew that spike happened when I had the article up on google search. A bunch of new search terms has appeared in my data. And at some point, I suspect within a few hours google removed/cluster it in favor of my Steemit version due to it being duplication. The corresponding spike afterword is me getting it relisting again and google going NOPE after realizing again. Fair enough that version is on a site only a couple months old and it has a lot less authority then what I’ve built up on my Steemit version. There are an endless amount of sites using our blockchain pulling your content making duplicates. At least my Steemit version is the one being shown compared to other platforms I just don’t even use.
The first spike was 100 and the next spike was 76 in impressions per day when I got it up again before it was hidden again. If nothing else this still is having a positive effect overall on my other Path of Exile content. Things are slowly coming in with a bunch of search results to my content that has very low relatability. In other words, Google has ranked my other stuff higher in some way that I can see Path of Exile + unrelated term being a search for and getting the impression from.
While I was hoping for a much better result due to all that time I spent on this. At least I am having some side benefits. I’ll promote it and maybe one day it will pop up and remain again as the more dominant version.
Steam
The biggest issue I face is Steam’s only way of ranking curator reviews is by total people following that curator. As such you have a bunch of trolls and people spamming with a lot of followers behind them. I’m at the bottom of just about every review. Very few are going scroll down that far and then click to expand my review. Let alone go out to my site for now.
In February I did promote my curator page a lot to people around me. They check it out tell me how it would be nice if they had the time to do such things. Then they went back to playing whatever game they were enjoying. Since then I’ve not promoted it since I was not getting any follows for it. As you can see numbers in March are more or less just not anything at all.
For now, I’m just working on getting a lot more game reviews out. For a while, many of my game reviews will be focused around games I’ve already played of which many are older. While these are getting search and looked into less quite a few of them don’t have a lot of curators as well. A number of these games spike in people looking them up when they go on sale for things like Summer or Winter Steam sales. There also just less competition overall in searches. It will take some time to build up authority.
I’m looking to be building up and hitting into those spikes. I can promote my own reviews around those big sales a site like Steam has elsewhere. My own 2019 Steam Sale got a lot of views during that Steam sale and was for a while one of my top performing posts. The long term issue is that page will now be dead so there is a cost of trying to take advantage of short term spikes like this.
Since that page now has some authority and I knew to expect a big pop in views during such events. I can just edit that page and get google to crawl it to notice there been changes. I’m not quite sure yet if that will be the best method or just writing a new post altogether. There are some things I still need to toy around with and understand.
This is the biggest area I spend most of my time in promoting and engaging with people. I’ve played around with a few different formats seeing what works and what do I want to spend time doing. I’m still messing around trying out different things and expect to for a while.
What I really like is game developers and their companies are on twitter for the most part and active. I’ve been engaging with a few of their posts and just other bigger names from time to time of content I’ve enjoyed. On some of the more indie game side, they are a bit more responsive in likening a tweet or even leaving a comment back. I don’t have a big following there so I expect any kind of engagement to be more on the limited side on their part and I can understand that. Hopefully over time as I grow and I keep at it that will change.
Just before March, I was considering trying out 10 tweets a day. With tools like Tweetdeck, I can just schedule out tweets and be on my way. Only checking in a couple of times a day at best unless I have a conversation going on. The issue came down to just not having much to say to be able to keep up with that kind of schedule. I also don’t want to be spamming out the same 10 game reviews every day.
Since I’m taking a more long term approach to my content it will make sense to link out to older posts from time to time. My main target is non-steem users so getting upvote does not even factor into the equation.
I have messed around with trying out my two Steem links to my content Steemit and Engrave. My Steemit links get more views, likes, and retweets. However, there is almost no conversion rate of people upvoting my content that does not already support me on Steem. I guess in people’s eyes if they heart my tweet they have now supported me and move onto the next person. My Engrave links, on the other hand, are getting more clicks through rates. It is, however, some traction. I would rather have a higher click rate then likes anyways.
I have loosened my policy a bit on whom and how many people I follow. Even more so since I discovered the hide retweets option! Since I am looking to interact with more and new people following more back it just helps. I’m not going go crazy and go on some massive f4f train to 400k followers. Gaining 72 followers in a single month is at least helping me to grow. That means more impressions and a higher chance at some form of engagement.
I’ve also been more focused on where I engage in March than I was in February. The net result was losing half my impressions but look at those profile visits. That’s the ticket right there. My old method of targeting some larger tweets got me the impressions but that was it. I still don’t mind cracking some joke somewhere or leaving a witty reply but I rather have an opportunity to convert people into followers and those were not doing so well.
While my stats where all over the place this month on Twitter I consider it making some progress. It’s just an easy place to engage, there only so much effort you can put into a single tweet, and that platform moves fast. So you can be more active and most won’t even notice unless they go out to your profile.
While I have a Facebook page I’m putting zero effort into that platform. A number of times now they have reminded me that “similar posts are buying an advertisement.” It would be one thing if I worked out my monetization for none-Steem users. It’s another thing to blow a bunch of money on promoting something that not even making me any money in return for now.
If I was going to spend money it’s not going their either. They are quite the iron first in just banning people and I already feel like I’m on thin ice with them reminding me every so often that I could buy advertisement with them. I’ve also just never liked that platform.
They also have a bot that checks each link and that has been my only traffic from FB. While I do need work on how I promote my content elsewhere when there is no short word limit in place. I’m not going to invest a lot of time here. They are also pushing for their own internal stuff and I would not be shocked they dislike anyone taking users off there site.
As you can see I’m getting nowhere there what so ever. For all, I knew I’m already shadow banned from there bot checking my site and seeing cryptocurrency games.
I’ve more or less abandoned the idea of trying to build up my Instagram following Enjargames. Every game developer to people posting about video games that I’ve looked into has next to no following what so ever. It’s a fraction of what they have elsewhere. Every time I look into how to grow there it’s always “send $100+ to person X, Y, or Z to get promoted for followers. That’s great many have built out business for themselves like that -- no thanks.
Is it worth my time to invest in a platform when the developer to games I’m creating content around have 1k or fewer followers on that platform? I just don’t think so. Even more so when they were at it for years trying to grow it and have it posted on their websites.
For what I can tell gamers are just not very interested. They also only show the photo unless you click on something. That is quite a pain in the butt to find things there.
Might be something I just spend 1 min a week posting to once I have some things worked out. I just don’t see it being worth spending any more time than that. I would be in utter shock to see a single referral from Instagram show up. Most just seem to be into spamming hearts and follows.
Final Thoughts
I just hope one day all this effort leads somewhere. Just so much time put into things that may never lead anywhere and me getting rather tired of the same old same old. I’ll keep this up for a while to see where it leads. I’ve never been a fan of social media and this sure reinforces it.
Information
Screenshots were taken and content written by @Enjar regarding my own content and numbers on the sites they are listed under.
