So You Wanna Write a RPG Blog: One More Don't

August 18, 2008 No comments

Following up on a guest post I wrote for the Chatty DM while he was on vacation, I’ve come up with one more thing you, the RPG Blogger, should NOT do: Don’t blog while your readers are sleeping. But Berin, you say, that shouldn’t matter! The intarweb is always on! Your prose is immortal and will be there around the clock! Why does it matter when you post?

I used to think the same thing, grasshopper. I’m one of those annoying people that writes a bunch of articles posts all at once, then sets them to post a day apart over the course of the week. My pattern was to set them to post at midnight, local time. If you’re in North America, as the majority of my readers are, that’s between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. your time. My logic was that folks would get up in the morning and have a fresh, hot UncleBear blog post waiting for them.

What really happened was that the post would sit there for a few days, and then comments would start to trickle in. It was very weird, so I started asking some of the regulars what the deal was. I just thought people came to visit the site once in a while and didn’t check it every day. The truth is a lot more high-tech. Most of my readers get to the site in two ways: via the RSS feed, and via Twitter. I’ve got a Twitter widget for WordPress that sends out a tweet whenever I post, and that flags people to check the site. Same with the RSS feed. Since I posted in the wee hours, by the time people got up to check their feed reeder and tweets I’d be way down the list, even a page or two back. It was easy to get lost in the noise. Folks would either get caught up eventually and see that there was a new post, or get around to visiting the actual site.

When I started setting posts to publish during daylight hours, when people were actively following Twitter and checking feeds, both traffic and comments went up. It makes sense, but it felt bizarre and it still seems a little weird. When you post matters as much as what you post.