This morning I have struggled a bit to get off the ground and coalesce into writing something that might be valuable to someone else.  One of the things you see a lot with my blog is me attempting to be honest with my readers.  This isn’t really the point of this mornings post but i would say if you are struggling with something…  let them in on it.  I’ve said before that blogging is therapeutic and at the same time lowering your guard a bit is too.  Now I am not saying that I recommend this practice for everyone, because it does in fact give trolls an attack vector.

The thing I wanted to talk to this morning is the interwoven relationship between blogging and social media.  I can say without hyperbole that almost every one of my social media accounts exists because of this blog as I sussed it out as another possible syndication venue for my content.  It is not a coincidence that both my twitter account and my blog both started in April of 2009, because twitter has long been the vehicle that bloggers get together to talk to one another.  This is why I asked for twitter handle as part of the sign up instead of other social media options.

I think the reason for this is that twitter is better than any platform at the quick distribution of a blog link.  You have enough characters to provide a quick summary, a link and an image enticing your readers to click through and visit your post.  The retweet culture allows someone to pass your information on… without passing too much of themselves in the process and I think that simply leads to more folks passing more information around than on other platforms.  Granted in the era of the quoted retweet that changed a bit, but I still feel like that platform is the best place to quickly distribute content.

The thing is…  I don’t just think this I know this from the statistics.  I’ve been running google analytics since day one and that has given me a lot of information about what works and what doesn’t work for the purpose of spreading my blog.  If I had utilized this more fluently rather than the generally lazy way that I do… I could be a hell of a lot more popular than I actually am.  However it does tell me things about which platforms work and which do not.  Let’s talk for a moment about the content I share and where it gets consumed.

Direct Traffic and RSS

First off one of the things you need to know is that the majority of your readers are probably still to this day going to be consuming your content through an RSS Feed Reader.  Before sitting down to write my post I ran some numbers for the past year of usage and only 14% of my traffic comes from any referral source.  This means the majority of my readers are either coming in directly or through an RSS feed reader.  There are some other statistics that I have through WordPress that tell me that the majority of my readers are in fact coming in through RSS.

I don’t want to necessarily talk about the numbers because I have a larger audience than some folks and a much smaller audience than others.  I use analytics for the purpose of learning about the data not necessarily as creating a benchmark to judge my success on and I highly suggest if you decide to go down that road you adopt a similar stance.  The big thing I want as a takeaway however is that RSS is in fact not dead and you are going to see a large number of your users that are not accessing your content  directly.  As a result I highly suggest you check your own blog out in a news reader and make sure it looks like you want it to look.  Since I am not trying to drive ad venue I syndicate my entire blog out over RSS instead of snippets…  your mileage may vary here.

Social Media

In the above bit I mentioned that only 14% of my readers come as referrals from any other source and that also includes social media.  As it stands right now I syndicate my content in the places that are built into WordPress, so that when I hit publish it also sends my content out there as well.  Here is a rundown of where all said content goes…

• Twitter – This is my primary social network
• Facebook – At some point along the line I created a Facebook account just for the blog.  I don’t use this network much.
• Google Plus – Hold out from that era when we thought Google Plus would rule the world and a lot of us bloggers started hanging out here.
• GPlus “Page” – Similar hold out where I thought it was a good idea to create a Tales of the Aggronaut page.
• Tumblr – I don’t even know why I do this, but it was an option in WordPress so might as well.

These are effectively the places that I can push to each day when I hit publish without further interaction.  The only publish option that I am not utilizing is Path…  which if I am being completely honest I  don’t know what the hell it actually is.  It’s seems to be an iPhone thing and since I am not an iDevice user I have never actually encountered it.  Now since only 14% of my traffic comes in through referrals…  I could make an argument that syndication doesn’t actually matter.  However I feel like putting your stuff in front of as many eyeballs as possible is always going to be a generally good idea.

Let’s talk a bit about where that referral content is coming from.

• 25% – Twitter – this is my primary platform for engagement so it probably isn’t shocking that the vast majority of my click-through’s come from it.  It probably says way more about my willingness to engage with it than the actual power of the platform.  My tweets don’t really go viral so it isn’t like I am getting a crushing number of hits this way.
• 12% – Bhagpuss.blogspot.com – That is right… my appearance in the Inventory Full blog roll is quite literally beating every social media platform but twitter.  Thanks Bhagpuss!
• 9% – Facebook – this shows up as a few different addresses but combined together it equates to a little less than 10% of the referral traffic.
• 2.5% – Google Plus – There are still folks actively using this platform in spite of the fact that I am not.  At one point I had a nonsense number of people following me so there may be some residuals from that?
• 1.3% – Reddit – Not something I actively engage with but a handful of my blog posts have made their way to Reddit where they got significant action.  Getting anything on Reddit means you are going to have a constant trickle of users from there clicking on the links as people search.
• .32% – Tumblr – I mean it makes a lot of sense given that my posts are not exactly formatted in the Tumblr way and I don’t spend any time engaged with that platform other than occasionally going on a reblog bender reposting cool comic book art.

Now as an academic experiment I extended out my timeframe and looked at all traffic I have ever gotten to my blog.  At that point a bunch of data points change… namely my referral rate goes up to 26% of my traffic and the influence of twitter drops to only 11% of that…  with WoW.com coming in second at a little over 8% showing the sheer influence of being part of the World of Warcraft blogging community used to be.  To round out the top five… you have Google Plus at number three, Facebook at number four, and Reddit at number five.  It is funny how things change over time.

Engagement

Ultimately my take away from all of this is that social media syndication is worth it… but only if you plan to engage with those communities.  I feel like my numbers don’t really point out that Twitter is the most superior platform but instead that it is the only platform I am willing to actively engage with.  It is the place where people know my name and respond to the things I say… and on the other platforms I am just a weird guy that refuses to use his real name or picture.  Granted my real name is pretty freaking easy to find and I have tweeted out my picture a few times… so it is a personal choice thing not like a witness protection program thing.  Ultimately I feel like you get out of social media what you put into it as far as blogging goes.  I still feel like it is my favorite way to link up with other bloggers, but especially now that we have the discord and how active it has been…  maybe that could shift into being that primary vehicle of communication for the community.

Regardless don’t feel like you have to do social media if you are not comfortable doing it.  My engagement brings me in some hits but in the grand scheme of things it accounts for a very small percentage of my total users.  The effect that is impossible to capture however is where people found out about my site in the first place.  I have a sneaking suspicion that if you somehow managed to factor that into the equation… then social media would have far more weight in the equation that it appears to have.  I choose to put my stuff out there and over time have built a community of regular readers, and if you do the same you will build your own circle of readers as well.

 

 

 

Yesterday I talked a bit about the name of your blog and why I felt like it was probably the single most important decision you made starting out.  Today I am going to talk about a very close second…  which is what platform you are going to be doing your blogging on.  There are a bunch of competing software packages and hosting scenarios out there, but I am going to attempt to do my best to work through them with you this morning…  or at least the major options.  For the sake of transparency I myself use WordPress in a hosted environment and have for a very long time.  There are pluses and negatives with that kind of set up, but a lot of the other options I have played with at one point or another.

Hosting vs SaaS

Ultimately your first real decision point is going to be…  are you going to be using a cloud/software as a service (SaaS) model for your site or are you going to procure your own hosting environment and maintain the site yourself.  This really is a question of how technical do you feel comfortable being?  Sure most hosting providers give you the option of installing something like WordPress or Drupal from the web based back end with the click of a few buttons.  However there will come a time at some point when you need to get your hands dirty in the innards of your software.  So ultimately you need to ask yourself if you are comfortable having to do that.

Ultimately the big thing that hosting the software does is give you the freedom to be able to try out any new plugins or themes that come out, because you can effectively re-roll your site as often as you like because you have the tools to do so.  Traditionally in a more SaaS model you are paying them to maintain the software where they give you a few configuration options but greatly limit your ability to install custom code.  For example if I were not as lazy as I am…  I could create a wordpress plugin to maintain all of the nonsense that we end up keeping track of with Blaugust.  When we were utilizing Anook quite a bit within the blogging community there was one of the folks that created a custom integration that would allow you to have an auto updating version of your Anook feed in your blog sidebar.

In a SaaS model that sort of thing really isn’t possible because the software company is maintaining the risk of hosting your content.  That means they need to make sure nothing that is happening on your blog will potentially negatively impact the other people on that platform.  What this means is generally speaking you will not have to worry quite so much about attack vectors and making sure things are patched to the latest versions, and in truth are probably going to have a much more stress free blogging experience.  However if you like to tinker with things…  you will similarly likely never be happy with the constraints placed upon you by a blog provider.

Self Hosting

So when you decide to host your own blog you are going to need two things…  a hosting provider and some blogging software.  The first part of that I don’t have a lot of advice with.  The service that I used to recommend hands down has gotten significantly less grand as time has gone on.  The service that I contemplated moving to…  is no longer open to new customers because it seems like it is ramping down.  So you are left with a minefield of options…  many of which I have heard both positive and negative things about.  InMotion I have some decent experience with in the past and they offer a WordPress hosting option for $8.99 a month (that goes down if you pay for multiple months in a row) that offers some hack/malware protection software along with the package.  Please note though I am not actively using them myself so I can’t really give it a full fledged thumbs up endorsement.

Once you have trudged through the hinterlands and decided where you are going to host your site, you need to pick a software package.  This is also a deluge of choice because as many people as there are out there… there seem to be options for blog software.  Some of the more common options are WordPress, Ghost, Jekyll and Movable Type.  If you want more than just a blog you can look at things like Drupal or Joomla…  but having had plenty of bad work experience with both I am not super fond of either.  That said there are a ton of folks who love them and swear by them, so your mileage may vary.  I would suggest that you look at pretty much all of the options, but in reality you are more than likely going to end up using WordPress.  The reason being that there is simply more support from that community for blog-centric needs…  and if you can think of it, there is likely already a plugin written to do the thing you want to do.

Once you have chosen something…  you need to install it…  which again is going to vary wildly based on the package that you choose.  I said before that more than likely a few of these options are going to show up in the auto configuration tools that your web host will likely have.  That said… automated WordPress installs in my experience often have issues.  My preference is to just use the normal web based installer process in setting it up that involves you creating your own MySQL database (also through a web based tool your provider will give you like PHPMySQL) and then feeding that information into the web GUI to set everything up.  If this sounds frustrating to you, then maybe the self hosting route is not your jam.  Granted there are a bunch of us in the Blaugust community that are going to be more than happy to help you sort these sort of things out.

SaaS / Cloud Platforms

If you checked the hell out of the last sequence of paragraphs then maybe your best option is to go with a feature-lite but also stress-lite blogging platform.  Here you have a wealth of options that are at your disposal.  I have my preferences but I am going to talk about a long list of options that range from completely free, to “freemium”, to paid only.  Quite honestly you can in theory blog with social media like Facebook or Google Plus…  but that is very much not my jam.  There is just too much platform rivalry and for every person like me that hates Facebook with a passion, there is someone else out there that hates some other platform with similar fury.  One of the options I am talking about is in the more social space, but it makes for a pretty reasonable blog option as well.  Essentially I am going to talk through some of these options as I view them.  Take anything I say with a grain of salt.

• WordPress.com – This is the fully hosted version of WordPress and lives in a halfway state between free and paid.  Essentially you can roll a site within moments for free and have a something.wordpress.com address to send your readers to.  They also offer a few premium features that you can pay for that get you closer to the WordPress.org self hosted experience, but you will never quite get that level of freedom.  This is going to be the best option if you want to start out small but at some point down the line want to move to hosting your own blog, because it is trivial to move content from a wordpress.com install to a wordpress.org self hosted scenario. There is a really good mobile client for WordPress and for both self hosted and SaaS you can get in and write very solid posts with full picture and theme support from a phone/tablet without needing to rely on the web interface.
• Blogger.com – This is the other big popular option for a quick and free blog.  I’ve used this in the past at length and my very first blog existed here…  and no I will never link it ever ever because it is embarrassing as hell.  In many ways Blogger feels like it at some point got locked in the dotcom boom look and feel and never really evolved out of it.  It still today feels very much as it did when it was competing with Live Journal and Xanga, and never really grew out of that era.  There are folks however that completely swear by it.. and it has hands down the very best implementation of a blogroll out there.  It also has very easy integration with google advertising if you plan on making money with your postings.  The biggest issue is…  every few years it feels like Google is about ready to kick it to the curb since they would really love you to use Google Plus as your blogging platform.
• SquareSpace.com – This is a platform I have never used but have heard a lot of great things about especially in the customer service and site uptime departments.  The reason why I have never used it is because there is no free option.  This is paid software and you are essentially given two tiers of access… Personal for $16 a month or Business for $26 a month…  with obvious price breaks for paying a year at a time.  I hear they have a lot of really cool toys behind the scenes and a library full of resources to build your site out in a web based drag and drop editor.  That said once again I have no personal experience with this and as a result can’t give a proper endorsement.
• Tumblr.com – This one lives in a weird space between social media and blogging platform, and what you end up with instead is an option that is really good at relatively short posts with lots of media file support.  There are folks who love Tumblr as a community, but I have never been super impressed with its often times hyperbolic nature.  That said I syndicate out to Tumblr and often get readers that come in from it so there is at least some traction there…  giving me a shocking number of followers on a platform I never really engage with.  What Tumblr really has going for it is that it is extremely simple to use, has a great mobile friendly web client and is one of your more hands off options.  You can do some pretty basic styling of a Tumblr blog but you will never really be able to do anything super crazy with it.  I appreciate it for its simplicity and the fact that it lends itself to relatively short posts that I can quickly consume.  Image Meme Tumblr is a thing and you are going to run into a lot of blogs that are nothing but reposts from fandoms…  similarly NEVER EVER EVER EVER search for something on Tumblr that you love without the safe search filters on.

Many Important Decisions

The long and short of this is that you are going to be asked to make a lot of decisions that you may or may not know the full ramifications of at this point.  I would suggest that you lead on the Blaugust community for support here because we each have our blogging platform of choice and some very valid reasons why we ended up that way.  I am going to largely push folks towards WordPress because it gives you more options, however I am sure there is someone out there that just hates it and would send you off a completely different path.  Ultimately there are ways to move content between providers, some of which are easier than others…  but what I am telling you is that you are not necessarily locked into a decision right now that you will use for the rest of your life.  I know my long time friend Calamity Jess has re-rolled her blog three or four times since our days in the WoW Blogging Community… and that is okay.  The readers that really matter will follow you wherever you happen to be hanging your hat, and ultimately you have to make the decisions that make you happy.

 

 

 

 

Welcome to Blaugust!!!

This week begins what I am referring to as “Prep Week” the idea is to start things a little early and give time for folks in the community to give advice on how exactly to get started.  This might be technical advice in how to get that blog up and running, or more soft skills sort of advise like how to find your niche.  The whole idea being that we can help prepare bloggers to be ready to hit the ground running as soon as August 1st rolls around.  I have to say this initiative has already out lived any expectations that I might have had for it…  and up until today we had yet to actually start properly.

After allowing Blaugust to fall by the wayside I was not really sure what sort of response I would get from the community.  The truth is that last year of Blaugust was fairly anemic as well with me not doing much support of my own thing.  I was not sure if people still cared or still wanted to band together into a larger gathering of minds…  but the answer is apparently yes.  As of posting this the official spreadsheet where I am keeping track of participants has 54 blogs signed up.  It is my hope as the first Blaugust posts start rolling in that the number is going to keep incrementing upwards.

At this point I have been plugging away at this nonsense for going on nine years… which to some makes me a veteran and to the eldest of our number…  a babe in the woods.  One of the things you are going to see with my blog is a lot of artwork by the amazing Ammo, and back at the seven year mark I commissioned her to do the above image of a bunch of my “Belghasts” from different games.  On the far side you have my Human Warrior in World of Warcraft, moving right my Blades/Shotgun character in The Secret World, next on the bottom my Bahmi Warrior from Rift and stacked on top of him my Exo Titan from Destiny, beside that my Imperial Dragon Knight from Elder Scrolls Online, and finally my Lalafell Warrior in Final Fantasy XIV aka Lalabel.  I’ve played a lot of characters over the years but none of them have been named “Aggronaut” which to some extent means that I failed at least a little bit in naming this blog, since I have been referred to as “Mr Aggronaut” more times than I can count when this blog is quoted.

The name of your blog is probably the single most important thing that you need to stick the landing on, because it becomes increasingly difficult to change once your site gets out in circulation.  I named this blog Tales of the Aggronaut because at the time my intent was for it to be a very niche blog…  World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking and Raiding blog.  The name Aggronaut being a play on Argonaut…  or in my mind one who navigates the Aggro… aka the number one role a tank performs in a party.  I am not sure however if anyone actually picked up on that, and instead expected a way more aggressive and angry blogging style than I have.  I wonder how many people I have turned off completely with them thinking the experience they would be getting was a rant blog.  In fact what I consider to be “me ranting” is apparently super tame in the global internet sense so I have a very ill fitting name for myself.

To make matters worse I carried this sin forward when we started our podcast…  not really knowing what to call it and instead just referring to it as AggroChat until it stuck.  Again there is the problem that if you hear a name like that, you expect it to be an aggressive podcast which it very much is not.  In fact there has been a few times when people have commented upon how very rarely do we actually say anything resembling a curse word.  Generally speaking “bullshit” is the worst thing we say and even then its only when describing some particularly egregious stuff and not actually that common place.  Basically all I am trying to say here is that I failed miserably in properly branding my blog and that you should probably not follow my example.  The cuter and more precious the name… the more likely its meaning is going to be completely lost on the bulk of your readership…  at least until someone points it out to them.

What’s In A Name

So ultimately what is the ideal name for a blog you might ask?  The truth is I don’t have a perfect answer because it is going to vary wildly between people.  In my experience the best blogs have short catchy names, that vaguely remind you of something…  but are also not so specific that they cannot be super malleable if the writer needs or wants to shift subjects.  The majority of us are going to be writing gaming blogs, and there will be an extreme tendency for us to name them based on some bit of a game we love…  or at least a gaming concept.  This can be a double edged sword but I thought I would spend some time picking on names of my fellow bloggers.  In truth I am not going to be saying anything bad, just talking about decisions that were made.

• Levelcapped.com – This is the site that Scopique runs and I have to say I am super jealous of the title and domain associated with it.  Capping your level is a fairly generic construct at this point, but it is also universally understood especially now that even first person shooters generally have some sort of a leveling mechanic with its requisite end game.  It conveys a notion without limiting options for taking the blog in different directions.  He could for example decide to reboot it completely away from gaming and turn it into a personal blog in his quest to “level up” or something of the sort.
• MMOQuests.com – This one is easy to pick on given that Stargrace no longer blogs using it and has instead adopted nomadicgamerseh.com as her new home.  First off… it is a great name…  if all you want to do is write about MMO Quests for the rest of your blogging career.  I have to feel like this is probably exactly why she made the jump to a more general blog title… in fact she says as much in a post.
• Bio Break – I have always loved the title of this blog even though for years I rammed the two words together and Syp can be mildly particular about doing that.  The need to take a bio break… whatever that means to you and walk away from the screen is something universal in gaming be in an MMO where the verbiage was popularized or in a console game when you just need to hit pause and do something else for a moment.  Every game groks this concept and as a result it is insanely sticky branding and has the benefit of rolling off the tongue well.
• Blessing of Kings – I’ve read this blog since my first days in the World of Warcraft blogging community and love it.  However the name is very specific to that game and will never really be seen as anything else than a World of Warcraft blog, and more particularly a Paladin blog.   Now I don’t think Rohan has any intent to blog about anything else, but I am just pointing out that the blog is pointed into a very specific corner and doesn’t have much of a way out of it.
• Inventory Full – Another great blog that I read almost daily and another great title that is instantly relate-able to anyone who looks at it and has ever played a game with an inventory management system.  While very much an “MMO Blog” it doesn’t have to be by the title and scope.  It could in theory shift to be any sort of gaming blog or even a personal blog talking about a busy life where it feels like your “inventory” is always full.
• MMO Gamer Chick – An amazing blog that has sadly gone silent over the years apart from re-syndicating the Battle Bards podcast.  The name tells you a very specific story that you should expect MMO Gaming Posts from a female perspective, and it is that first part that once again limits the longevity of options for the blog.  In the crush of the 2000s… MMO Gaming was the new hotness that we never thought would go into repose…  but alas the age exciting new MMOs has eclipsed making a title like this rough to keep interested in as a writer.
• DragonChasers.com – Again another excellent title that works in a bunch of different ways.  You could take it literally and interpret as a raiding blog where the person talks about taking down bosses or “slaying internet dragons” in common parlance.  You could also interpret as a metaphor or any number of topics that are difficult to tackle, or simply turn it into a more personal blog.  The name gives you enough room to shift it as your own interests have shifted.

Ultimately I gave myself a short enough name that I have been able to change things up as needed and folks don’t generally remember the actual name of the blog, they just remember Aggronaut.com.  I am saying all of this because if you stick with this for any length of time, your interests are going to shift.  I started my life as a World of Warcraft Tanking and Raiding blog… and shifted into a Raiding and Guild Management blog, then eventually into a more general World of Warcraft blog.

From there I moved into Rift and lost most of my readers over night when I made the change, because being part of a very specific community often means the folks who are reading you…  are only interested in that very specific community.  Sure I got an influx of new readers from the Rift community, but it was a pretty traumatic shift for me personally to go through.  From there I shifted into a general MMO blog and now when the whole “blogging every day” thing happened shifted into a blog about me and my adventures both in game and in the real world with zero pretense of trying to have a higher purpose.

Effectively Tales of the Aggronaut has become an extremely obtusely named personal blog when something like Belghast.com that I do in fact own probably would have been better to use.  However at this point it feels like it is too late in the game to make a major shift like that given the search engine traction that I have after blogging for going on ten years with the same website.  So again I go back to the statement I made at the beginning of this lengthy diatribe…  your name is quite possibly the most decision you can make when it comes to a blog and it will for good or bad ultimately dictate what sort of blog it becomes.