Which is to be expected for two basically brand new blogs (even if the model horse website has been around for a bit), but my goal is to improve those numbers by the end of this month. I’m not setting and hard goals for percentage improvement yet, I’m just looking to see if anything I can do will bring those numbers up.

Perish Twice, my blog on dual-boxing in World of Warcraft currently has a score of 90.76% Bounce Rate, 00:00:10 Avg. Time on Site and 96.74% New Visits.

Custom-Models.com, my blog about model horses isn’t currently tracked by Google Analytics, so there’s no place to go but up!

In order to increase the length of time people spend on my blogs (and to decrease the bounce rate), I need to focus in on what people are looking for when they drop by. Most likely my pitiful numbers are because folks surfed in expecting something that I didn’t provide. So let’s check out the warcraft blog, since it’s the only one I have data on at the moment.

What Do They Want?

First step is to figure out the most popular thing on the blog, which at the moment is the post about controlling Hunter Pets. It gets a whopping 15.38% of the site traffic, which could mean I have a good topic I need to expand upon.

Using Analytics I can then drill down and check on each of these pages to how they got here (google, links, etc), and how long they stayed before leaving, and if they went to another page or just headed out again. Most importantly, I can see what keyword brought people here (ie what were they looking for?)

1. city of heroes pet macros
2. pet macros aggresive
3. basic hunter macros turn on off growl
4. can hunter pets be keybound
5. cast feed pet macro
6. city of heroes macro pet
7. dual boxing macro
8. how to macro your pet abilities to your attacks
9. hunter dual box pet talents
10. hunter pet dungeon turn off growl

Well, sadly two of the ten items are things relating to another game, and although I did love playing my Mastermind over at City of Heroes… that’s not what this blog is about. But thankfully the rest of the items are things the post was actually focusing on. Still, the average time spent on the page and the bounce rate make it unlikely they are finding what they need.

So now we step back a moment.

Pretendy-Fun-Time Games

Close your eyes (or don’t, because it’s hard to read with your eyes closed) and imagine you are a surfer. You have typed in “cast feed pet macro” and you see the post for Pets, Pet Macros, and Stupid Things MeatShield Does. Now open your eyes. Was this what you were looking for?

Well, no. The bits I was looking for were at the very bottom of the post — and it’s a long post. Being a jaded internet surfer and not wanting to waste my time, I click back and try another search engine link.

So I went back and added bookmarks to the top of the post, allowing people to hop to the bits they were interested in. Since 40% of the incoming search terms were referencing information actually found on the page, we’ll see if that increases any of the page stats. (And I’ll keep it in mind for any longer posts I write in the future.)

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

I’ll need to go back and do this for every post that Google shows anyone surfing in on. I need to take the content I already have and make sure that people know they have found what they are looking for. I’ll also need to make notes on which topics seem to interest the travelers most, because that’s while I’ll need to focus on for my next blogging adventures.

Which will take a good bit of time, and it’s why I’m not setting and specific goals for how I want my traffic patterns to change. I’m certainly no expert on how to keep readers reading, but I figure I’ll learn as I go.

(Next week I’ll work on developing the ‘keywords’ that I want each blog to be aiming for…)

Amusingly, ‘running a home business’ could also count as a hobby since I enjoy creating and maintaining systems as much as anything else!

At the moment the two hobbies that cost me money are working with Model Horses and Dual-boxing on World of Warcraft. While neither of these aren’t things I have to have, they are things I enjoy doing– hence the investigation into finding ways to make them ‘free’.

Model Horses – $varies (Material Costs)

Custom Model Horse

My Model Horse hobby is a very extensive once. It covers the factory models – created by larger companies, artist resins and chinas – created by a single artist or a community of artists, miniature tack and props (saddles, stadium jumps, four-in-hand harnesses, etc), and artists who paint and modify models.

These models and props are then entered into competitions where they are judging on their collectability, compared to the breed standards of real horses, or are evaluated for workmanship.

Custom Model Horses

While there are many folk within the hobby who focus exclusively on collecting and trading Original Finish model horses, I find myself much more drawn to the customization of the models. I paint and modify the sculpting on resin and mass produced plastic models, turning them into both realistic and fantasy equines. This is the portion of the hobby in which I ran my last small business, and although I never turned a particularity large profit, it was a lot of fun.

As I am getting back into the hobby after several years away, I am getting a feel for where the markets are. Even with the recession it looks like there is still a market for the types of custom models that I normally paint… but there may also other areas I can expand into. I’ll need to look over my notes and then do some market testing on the forums to see what people would like to see.

The blog for this hobby can be found at www.Custom-Models.com.

World of Warcraft – $30 a month

World of Warcraft Dual-Boxing

There are currently millions of players across the world who participate in this Massively Online Role Playing Game. Blizzard’s company policy is not to allow the use of copyrighted images or material by anyone (save for a few large companies). However this hasn’t stopped people from creating guides on how to make gold, play specific classes, level as fast as possible, etc. There are also programmers who design add-ons for the game, and artists who sell custom portraits of Warcraft characters or other small artwork.

Artwork

I’m not sure if the artists are technically legal, since they are depicting Blizzard characters as accurately as possible– but I suspect it’s because they don’t make enough money for Blizzard to worry about. I did send them an email asking if they ever made exceptions to the ‘company only’ rule, and if a sole proprietorship counted as a ‘company’…  and they never responded. I’m not interested in testing the legal waters, so the only artwork I’d be doing would be dependable by parody.

Add-ons

Add-ons are required to be free, per Blizzard’s rules, so the only income from developing and maintaining those are in the form of donations. This is a freeware approach to programming and while it might make a little money on the side, it’s not enough to keep most programmers interested in the projects over the long term. If I do any coding, it will most likely only be to improve my own gaming experience.

Guides/e-Books

The guides/e-books are the only thing that I can see as being worth the time and effort, but with the next expansion coming (Cataclysm) there will be massive changes to the game. It’s safe to say that most guides will need to be rewritten once it launches, so it might be best to hold off on those for now.

For now my plan is to simply focus on learning as much as I can about my hobby subset, which is playing more than one character at once. This is called Multi-boxing, or more specifically, Dual-boxing, but is done on one computer. This subset is a much smaller portion of the overall player-base, so for now I will be focusing on making my blog as informative as possible and hopefully I’ll be able to add Google Addwords or something similar at a later date.

The blog for this hobby can be found at Perish Twice.