Every month, I publish my stats on the blog and "download numbers*" from DriveThru RPG. Why?
When I started this, I did everything willy-nilly without much evaluation of what I was doing. Back in July of last year, I wondered how much money I was making. I got a number $314.
Ok.
How? No idea. It isn't terribly important how much or how without a record of how much time I put in on this. I started taking in an interest in my stats, which allowed me to appreciate how people were using my website and coming into contact with my 5 products on DriveThruRPG.
Back in August of 2018, I broke some ribs. I started selling books while all hopped up on pain pills and a lack of sleep. I got into this with zero consideration AND just in time for my main vehicle for contact with consumers to close (Rest in Peace, G+!).
Now that I doing research before taking action, I know a bit and would like to share with anyone who thinking about creating a blog or a product line.
Here is a little information about how I promote my stuff. I primarily use
MeWe, and make efforts to promote on both
Dice.Camp and
Mastodon. I am also found on
Old School RPG Planet. I have a presence on
Facebook, but it is small.
Today, I had a chance to talk to
Jon Salway,
vb Wyrde and
Wayne's Books on MeWe.com about Facebook stats. We all have Facebook pages, which don't seem to be working as we wish. (Those FB links are
Wayne's Books, vb Wyrde, and
These Old Games)
We were all noticing how much FB wanted us to pay money for contacts, and what contacts and interactions were small. I ran some stats and found out some data. First, FB was telling me that I had zero likes in the past 28 days, 6 pageviews, 11 people reached and 9 engagements, whatever any of those things are. Added together, it's "26 things".
My Google Analytics was telling me a different story. In the same 28 days, I had 74 sessions from Facebook. Hmm.
Which is right? Google doesn't have a horse in the game when it comes to Facebook as a traffic source. If they did, they'd under report. So, "26 Things" happened on Facebook, but I got 74 people coming to my page from FB. That works out to 2.84 visits per "26 Things" on Facebook. I can also see that these "things from Facebook" were rather active. Most them dropped out, but many of them when on to click other stuff on my site. That's engagement. And it's engagement from people that Facebook told me didn't engage.
I suspect that someone finds my page on FB, clicks a link to my website, but after reading they don't go back to Facebook and comment or click like. That sounds about right.
So, it probably isn't in my best interest to ever pay to boost a post.
Another point about Facebook. You have three ways of having a presence. I have a page which people can follow. It holds content that is not shared with my friends and family. It isn't very effective. Second, you can create an account which is only about your business, you effectively don't have a personal account for friends and family. Everything you do is for business not for friends and family. This is effective, and at a guess I think Dyson Logos uses this method. I could be wrong, I am guessing based his activity and comments. Devon Rue took a different path. She has an account which seems to mix all of her business contacts with friends and family. Dyson and Devon's methods are super effective where as my is horrible.
Dyson recently posted that he discovered that if made a post with a link, FB depreciated it. That's annoying, they want him to pay for interaction. He discovered that if he made a post without a link and added the link to the comments of that post, more people saw it. Interesting and annoying.
Anyway, this is getting long and I am almost out of knowledge to drop. I hope this helps.
*"Download numbers" are not sales. My sales are poor. 14 times as many people download for free vs. pay for a product at any price, including a penny.
