April Wrap-Up + May Sneak Peek

Hello, Patrons of all levels, shapes, sizes, and colors! I have another major, month-end bulletin for you as CK's insiders and critical supporters.

April was a month I buckled down and blogged A LOT, which meant a lot of the action was on the front page of CK for a change. I love that, but not as much occurred behind-the-scenes as I had hoped.

Below, I've recapped all the action for you in a series of easy-to-swallow bullet points. Then, for those of you who love to devour the details, I'll recap everything in a longer form below.

April Wrap-Up:

• April was CK's 2nd-highest traffic month of all time, only missing March's mark by 2%.
• This campaign grew 15% and is only $26 away for not only paying for CK, but its critical helper apps, like Photoshop.
• 3 new comic guides and 1 new comic universe launched to Crushing Comics Club! Plus, I'm almost done Scarlet Witch for Pledgeonauts.
• 4 comic guides became available to the public!
• I wrote more than 30 blog posts in 30 days!
• I posted 5 new full-length comic book reviews!
• I shared another CK exclusive - an early review of Frank Gogol's Grief!
• It's the time of year for the Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot! I coordinated early with creator Tigereyes so I could be ready with tons of blog content to support the survey.
• I maintained my gym streak and added dance classes to my workouts!
• Knowing you are taking care of CK's costs allowed me to pay off the last of my final student loan a few months ahead of schedule!

Unfortunately, the laser focus on blogging meant that I didn't touch the very important behind-the-scenes tech goals I set last month like revising CK's overall taxonomy, adding image-based sliders to CK homepage navigation, complete updates to existing Marvel guides, continuing to update the Guide to Marvel Omnis & OHCs, or getting anywhere close to videos.

May Sneak Peak:

• Hopefully break $100 of pledges!
• Launch 4 or more new comic guides, plus the Scarlet Witch guide and a new Patrons' Choice guide (more on my choices in yesterday's poll)
• Release 5 comic guides to the public
• Work on a pair of new CK exclusives!
• Revise CK's overall taxonomy
• Add image-based sliders to CK homepage navigation
• Complete updates to existing Marvel guides
• Continue to update the Guide to Marvel Omnis & OHCs as a thank you for hitting the $66 goal
• Release the X-Men Index as a thank you for hitting the $84 pledge goal
• Get a haircut so that bad hair days are no longer my excuse not to do video content

Seriously, I think I'm avoiding video exclusively because of bad hair days.

If you want to stop reading now, that's totally cool - you've heard the major news! Please know that I appreciate your support today and every day.

If you want a more nuts-and-bolts, full-of-data, behind-the-scenes look at what's happening at CK, keep reading!

April Blog Performance

April's traffic held steady from March to the tune of only a 2% difference, which was both a plus and a minus.

On the plus side, it's awesome that a shorter month performed neck and neck with March.  Considering March is a day longer than April and one day would add 3.33% more results onto the April data, they were virtually the same.

It's also awesome that none of the March gains were just short term wins. Some pages saw big boosts, like the main page (due to steady blogging), Captain America (likely due to Secret Empire drama), and Deadpool and Cable (due to film interest and sharing).

Also, many individual posts did huge numbers - not only the big Omnibus mapping posts connected to Tigereyes' survey, but individual posts like my Secret Empire review. Overall, 2017 blog posts did >150% better in April than they did in March, and 2016 posts also saw more than a 25% lift.

That's a lot of positives, and they're going to keep CK moving briskly towards achieving its big goals for Q2!

On the negative side, traffic isn't scaling up uniformly across all pages.  For example, the main Marvel page saw a 11% decline in pageviews across both new and returning users.

That last bit freaks me out. I learned from diversifying the guides from X-Men back in 2012 that I lose some of the uniform focus of my SEO as I add new pages, so it's not entirely surprising to see Marvel pages dip as I introduce more DC content. 

The heartening aspect is that it's not like all Marvel destination pages were also down 11%. It could be the blog is getting more efficient as people rely less on the splash page. I'll be keeping a close eye on it.

New guides, blog posts, and a lack of behind-the-scenes pages

I felt like I went hard at blogging this month, but it wasn't until I checked my time tracking plugin that I realized just how hard that was.

I spent over 130 hours on CK in April, not too far from the ludicrous 180 hours I spent in November for the launch of this Patreon. 

The hours weren't spread uniformly across all posts. Removing both the Star Wars  and DC Elseworlds guides would reduce the hours to less than 100, which is the maximum amount of time I realistically have in a month without skipping sleep every day.

Related: I haven't been sleeping too much lately.

Not that I'm complaining about spending 130 hours blogging - it's one of my favorite things to do! More than sleeping! I love it!

Yet, spending so much time on blog posts and pages in April meant I never even touched the backend work I need to do to keep CK moving in a positive direction. Especially with so much content flooding the main page, the hierarchy improvements and image sliders are more critical than ever!

I'm not sure how to balance my obsession with daily posts against the amount of time they take - plus keep up the pace of new guides. And sleep, occasionally. 

Star Wars was the last of my mega-huge new guides until I tackle Superman later this year, but even without Star Wars and Elseworlds I would have been putting in a pretty spectacular amount of effort into CK in April. I said back in November that I wouldn't ratchet up to that intensity until this campaign was into the hundreds of dollars of support.

I say that in no way to complain about your level of support! OMG, no. You are amazing and you are making my life so much easier and more predictable. I just have to be real about how much time it's reasonable to put into CK in a regular month with where it stands at the moment. 

It's awesome that this level of effort yield 15% growth in this campaign, but it can't also yield relatively flat traffic. I need to refocus some of this energy into actions that bring more new readers to CK.

Exclusive Content!

I was really happy with the chance to have early access to Frank Gogol's phenomenal Grief OGN on CK to introduce his Kickstarter campaign.

However, I think I really botched the opportunity I had with that early access. I opted for a lengthy review to try to lend social proof to Frank's campaign, but right now I don't have the volume of regular main page readers to have made much of a difference. Plus, I think unfamiliar readers would rather read a preview or an interview.

Also, being critical of his book - even in the context of a pretty glowing review - feels like the wrong move, in retrospect. I always want my reviews to come across as entirely fair and uninfluenced by access, but I'm in no way a big enough fish that I need to make creators feel like they're rolling a dice on giving me that early access!

My combined preview, review, and interview with Hezekiah Jones last month performed much better as a post and felt like a better strategy as a preview post. 

I have the chance to preview two more upcoming books in May and June, and I'm going to experiment with format to hew a little closer to the Hezekiah Jones model.

(Incidentally, you have another two days to pledge just $1 for the full Grief graphic novel , and it's definitely worth it!)

This exclusive preview content is a drop in the bucket in terms of traffic, but I think it's an important credibility builder for CK. I've really loved recent X-Men creator interviews  from Xavier Files, so much that I decided to support them on Patreon .

Also, by reaching out early to Tigereyes about this year's Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot , I was able to get ahead of the posts about the survey. That means doing tons of lengthy, evergreen content while the ballot votes are ongoing, plus regular content once it's out. 

Despite the voting audience numbering in the low hundreds, last year the combination of voters and onlookers lead to hundreds of new CK readers and thousands of page views with much less preparation on my part. I think the blog is in AMAZING shape to receive those new views in 2017.

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I hope you're enjoying this behind-the-scenes look at my developing CK from an occasional personal blog to a more-consistent content destination. 

I know my analysis might sound like a little bit of a downer on the whole, but that's the reality of (a) being a data-obsessed perfectionist and (b) creating content on the web. There's always something to improve, and even when you feel great about the quality the truth is in the data! 

Watching a major force in comics journalism like Comics Alliance (one of the influences I named in my FAQ!) go dark in April just reinforced how much of a privilege it is to be writing to any size of audience on any topic on the web while making even a slight profit, and how important it is to be incisive and realistic about the results every day.

None of this would be possible without your support - not the beefed up content, or this depth of focus on analyzing it success, and certainly not paying off a loan a few months early because of my lightened load of monthly expenses without CK to worry about! 

That's all I've got for now! If you made it to the bottom of this massive missive, I'd love to know what details are the most surprising or exciting to you and what you're looking forward to the most.

Excelsior!