This is the second round-up report, for people who are too busy to read the site. Also, for people who are interested in some of the processes behind how a site operates, this might be interesting.
Every month, I’ll write a short report like this so you can see how the site is progressing and what’s planned for the next month.
October 2015 Site Report
October was a terrible month for the site and associated projects. I’ll talk more about this as I go through the report. But here’s an overview:
I had a low word count for the month. I forgot technical details. I checked out of promoting the blog in anyway. Added to that, I had massive plans for this month which required a lot of attention.
It was enough for me to start pulling my hair out.
But first, let’s talk about what did happen:
October 2015 Posts
I posted six times to the site in October 2015.
Firstly, I posted a site report for the first month of operation.
Then I wrote a series of pretty long posts on building an authority website.
The first part was an overview of one of my projects.
The second part was about the writing style you need to use on authority websites.
The third part was about how to build an authority website.
The fourth part was how to make money from an authority website.
I then finished up the month with a review of Web Copy That Sells by Maria Veloso.
Writing Figures
After writing just less than a hundred thousand words last month, October 2015 was a lot lower. I averaged just under 60,000 words. This is really low for me, and I expect November to be a lot higher in terms of word count.
The most important thing about a writer is that they write. The amount of words I write per month is one of the figures I take most seriously.
Jamie McSloy Writing Figures October 2015
Site Figures
This isn’t so great either. Like I said, the figures for the site probably drop off around the time I stopped actively messing around on Twitter and the like. I didn’t really do any promotion.
I got 124 views for the month. Criminal. We’ll see if we can pull it back this month. I should do, because I’ve got some exciting stuff planned.
October 2015 Web Traffic Figures
For what it’s worth, top performing articles were Why SEO Doesn’t Matter For Writers and How To Get a Writing Job Without Any Experience.
In better news, the site now appears when you search my name. Hopefully that will continue.
Social Media
I am not a social media person. Still, we have to adapt and survive in the 21st Century. I played around on Twitter and went from 0 followers to 10 over the course of the month, with the strategy of posting occasional info and messing around. You can see that in action with the Jamie McSloy twitter page.
Facebook removed my page because I wasn’t prolific enough for them. The JamieMcSloy.co.uk Facebook page is back up and running, however.
Google Plus for Jamie McSloy exists as well, though I really forget about that.
At some point, I’ll build these out so they are entities in their own right. I want to get the site figures up and above 100 views a month first though!
Project I
Disaster. I tend to write posts a month in advance. Unfortunately, I left the posts for Project I in draft mode as opposed to scheduling them to post automatically.
Again, I only hope that I can rectify the problem and sort that out and achieve better things this month!
(In other news, the books that will accompany this website are going well. Planning is finished. Now to write them. This is one of the planning projects I talked about that took up my time this month.)
November 2015
November, as most writers already know, is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I’ll be releasing posts that are to do with self-publishing, publishing, writing and fiction this month. I might even extend it to December as well as I have a lot of material in the works.
Those posts will start with my thoughts on Kindle Unlimited, and whether it’s a gold mine for self-published authors, as I promised on the Jamie McSloy twitter a few weeks back. That post will go live tomorrow, on the 5th.
Closing Thoughts
October 2015 was an annoying month in terms of word counts, but I also planned five novels, three non-fiction books, set up a publishing schedule and planned and wrote enough articles for this site that I can concentrate on other things during November. Namely, NaNoWriMo and actually getting somewhere with site traffic.
If you’re writing for a living, then there will be times that you’ll achieve less than you want as plans mix and match themselves. Some projects finish, some projects start slowly.
That’s all I can really say. On to November I guess!