More People Engage With My Website Than...

It's eerie to find an action on my part that actually works...a little. I only became interested in my Google analytics out of boredom, and out of fleeting curiosity. From time to time I'd wonder whether anyone was actually reading my blog/website posts, ones that I really do try to craft in an interesting way. Even with a blog post like this one, I do my best to make it not only grammatically correct, but cohesive and interesting. I've got a few blogs and Blogger-made websites (for my band, for my music musings, etc.), and they don't see a lot of traffic. That doesn't bother me, because I'm not currently focused on those sites, and thus I seldom update them.  

With my author site, I'd truly like more visitors. It's not as if I think that would drive more sales, but it's a "pride" thing; a feeling that I'm not shouting into the wind. It gets pretty lonely out here. So, I've taken a few baby steps to add more content to my site, and it's working. It's not working a lot, but my analytics tell me that average engagement time has increased, and that a few more visitors are reading my news section. 

As the title of this post alludes to, I've gotten more engagement with my website than I ever got with my author newsletter. Some people are interested, but apparently they're not my newsletter subscribers. As newsletters go, mine had to be the biggest failure in the history of newsletter failures, which is why I discontinued it. Sure, it's possible that my visitors arrived at my site by accident, but a few of them are actually perusing it.

That being said, I certainly can't add new content every day just to keep my numbers up. And I'm not going to try any "tricks" like I did with my newsletter ~ you know, giveaways, quizzes. I'm not anti-giveaways, but only one person ever entered the ones I advertised in my newsletter. And it's not worth the HTML hassle of trying to place an entry form on my site. 

I have no way of knowing whether the couple of passages I posted from my current novel were even read by anyone. I'd like to think they were. There has to be some reason why my numbers have gone up, and those are the only updates I've done. And that was against my nature to begin with. I disagree with posting unpublished book content online. It doesn't feel right, for a few reasons, but my justification is, who cares? The novel isn't going to sell gangbusters once it's published, so I might as well do something with my words.

This is a very, very small victory, but a victory nonetheless. If only it wasn't fleeting.