Trip Report, September 1st, 2022

Trip report from the third month of the journey. In which we begin work on the text adventure series of posts, get serious about analytics and metrics and start to figure out how to publicize posts. Also, fun with numbers.

Photo by Pixabay

Travelogue

This is the third month on the journey. This month saw three themes evolving concurrently - the text adventure series, analytics and metrics, and publicization. Early in the month, having completed the Rock, Paper, Scissors series of blog posts, I began the next series of blog posts about how to make a text adventure game. This series of posts will run through at least 10 posts. To first two weeks of the month were spent doing research, planning, and designing a game. The last two weeks, I published the first 5 posts in the series. My plan is to publish two a week until I've covered the material I need to. After that I'll cap it off with the creation of a complete game using the engine that the post series builds.

The second area of work this month was to get registered with Google search and beginning to work with the Google Analytics data added at the end of last month. Blogger does have embedded analytics, but they are notoriously inaccurate. I'm reporting some of the first numbers below. Over the next months, my primary focus metrics is to drive up page views via the addition of more content and working out how to best publicize posts in the blog. Also part of this work has been to review performance in the Google search console and Google's crawling of the site to ensure that the most important posts get crawled and indexed.

Which brings me to my last theme. Last month I stepped tentatively into promoting blog posts. During August, I continued experimenting with publicizing blog posts with mildly better results.

Future Plans

My current focus is on continuing to create posts for the text adventure series. Secondarily, I'll continue working on developing the publicization approach for blog posts. I'll keep tracking metrics to know what is working and what isn't.

Achievements

Found by Google - first crawl - August 4

Tenth Post - August 28

20,000 Words - August 31

Third monthly report - September 1

The Numbers

A thank you to all the supporters past, present, and future who make these numbers possible.

Month	Revenue	Posts	Indexed	Blogger Page Views (BPV)	Analytics Page Views (APV)
August:	$0.00	10	4	1189	258
July:	$0.00	5	0	1067	18* (Partial month)
June:	$0.00	2	0	626* (Includes personal)	0* (Not installed)