Blogsperiment - August: What happened? Oh yes! And the story of a Fireball!

I’ll tell the story

about this sketch of a Fireball 

at the end of this post but first...

In August, I promised to give some sort of evaluation of the effect of posting a daily themed series on a personal blog. My promotional method is to post a ‘pointer’ to a blog entry on Facebook and Twitter most days, although never on Sunday. These posts are available to anyone, but because they are in the main about science and faith, I do not allow any comment as I suspect I might become the target of zealous Biblical literalists and equally zealous atheists.

In addition, I am part of four FB groups with a Christian focus. These groups have between 2 - 300 and 3500 (one group) members. I chose to run this experiment throughout Creationtide. This is the 34 day period designated within most mainstream churches to celebrate the wonders of our planet and our responsibility towards it. It starts on 1st September and ends on St Francis’ Day, 4th October. My contributions broadly follow that theme, but also set that celebration into a cosmic framework. The reason for that is hinted at in the name of my blog ‘The Cross and The Cosmos’.

So my observations are as follows, bearing in mind that my only profile is that of an unknown amateur writer, known only to those who have stumbled upon my blog over the nine years of its existence. To set that into more context; over the nine years the site has attracted just over 266,000 pageviews from more than 120 countries - but those are fairly often, the work of a ‘bot’, for to turn an average daily viewing of between 50 and 70 to a day with more than 400 views nearly all within a single hour’s time ’spike’ suggests that is not about wanting to engage with the content of a blog. From various bits of information, I estimate the interested readers account for about 60% of total (ie round about 150,000 views).

So I posted from 1st September onwards. The first 10 days showed little variance from my ‘normal experience, then over the next ten days there was a marginal improvement. However, by the 25th day, there was a markedly noticeable increase which looked to be ‘genuine’ hits as far as I could tell. So my overall impressions are:

• Probably worth a shot if you have a theme that lends itself to a special focus and you can tie to a period that of itself generates some publicity.
• Don’t expect wonders - but do remember that you can then refer back to the series in years to come.
• Unless you have a ‘naturally’ marketable theme, there is not a great benefit to pursuing this idea.
• ALSO: I suspect no period will generate traffic in anything like the way Christmas and Easter act as a draw. Over the last seven years my Advent/ Christmas Collection has generated 12.8K viewings and my Lent collection 7.6K over about six years. 

I hope this information proves helpful to some.

I am going to end in a child-like way, telling you the story of an experience while on holiday in Suffolk during September (we count ourselves very fortunate to have got away this year). At 3am one morning, I saw a fireball! These are usually a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience. Here is my tone-poem account to go with the sketch I did of the phenomenon (above). If conversations were normal, I’d simply tell my friends about this. But as normal conversation is infrequent, I couldn’t resist telling you, you wonderful readers. Thank you for listening!