Play This Game With Yourself

A bit unfortunate this title, because it suggests a little ‘alone’ time with yourself, however, What my game is about is this; beat your stats from yesterday and force your site to do better. You write content for your website, because you want people to read it, no matter what other intentions you have once your reader is at the site, you want, firstly, to get them to read what you are talking about.

So what’s the game and how can you play? Well it’s all about taking yesterdays figures or activity you or your site has done and improving on it.

• Stats

I don’t use Google Analytics as most of you know, various reason but mainly because I know for a fact it isn’t tracking some of my visitors and clicks etc. I know this because I have StatPress and Site Stats both reporting the same things that GA isn’t, whether or not it’s not installed properly or just isn’t recognising the short url’s I don’t know, anyway I digress.

I always look at my traffic stats, to see how many visitors I have had today, what search engine results I am getting and to see if I am beating yesterdays and this week is beating last weeks.

Just to explain the screen grab, it’s my StatPress plugin, which shows my unique visitors (in dark blue), pageviews (blue), spiders (light blue) and feeds in orange. So this grab shows the last 5 days, the stats plugin is saying the site had 368 uniques yesterday, 2,885 page views with 1,590 coming from spiders and 189 from feeds. Now, I have yet to across a traffic analyser that gives 100% accurate information, my other plugin says I have had more than this daily, but it give me a bench mark goal to play the game.

• Comments

The site has been averaging 50-100 comments a day for a while now (about a month) and I can always tell is been a quiet day (traffic wise) when the comments are low. Best way to improve the amount of comments you receive? Well two ways, reply to the comments being made, this creates a community, which for me is the most important part of this site, I love hanging out with your guys in the comments section.

Secondly is to comment on other sites. I would say 90% of the sites I comment on, the owner of that site comes and comments or at least visits.

• Posts

If you publish new content to your site 4 or 5 days a week, then try updating 7 times a week, just to see if you get an increase in traffic and how it affects your comments, whether you get more or less. The main game I play with my posts is to try to get that new post onto the most popular posts you see on the top left corner.

This is a great game for me as it forces me to improve on the quality of post and think about what the readers of this site would like to read. Hopefully this post will be up there sharpish.

• Other Sites

Probably the best part of the game for a lot of reasons, but the most time consuming one. Visiting other sites and leaving comments, where I can add value, has to improve every day, other wise I feel I’m letting myself down. So take today for example, by the time I have gone to sleep I would have visited 30 sites, tomorrow I will push it to 31 and so on. You can’t always do it, because this is the last thing I do when I work on the site, but it works wonders.

By visiting a lot of sites and leaving your bread crumbs, where you can, increase your presence and chances of click through from other people’s audience. I also like doing this because it provides a lot of my inspiration for my content.

As I said it is really time consuming so I do this at the end of my day, so that I know the site and it’s readers and catered for first then I visit for long as I can.

So there it is, the game to play with yourself.

What does everyone think?

What games do you play with yourself?

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Tagged as: game, play, yourself