Yard Sale Gaming blog

[retrosportsgamer]

Noizzzzzzzze - are you pimping this at all in social media circles or seeing a lot of traffic via word press?

Have some great material (I didn't buy Burger Time after reading Dave's review) out there, alert the masses!

[dsheinem]

Hmm... Now that we have reviews for the 3DS and Vita versions of BlazBlue on YSG, perhaps we could collaborate for a comparison piece?

where's the 3DS Review?

it was in the original magazine version -- but for the site going forward, I'm keeping reviews more recent.

ah, ok, I took "on" YSG to mean the site (as opposed to "in" the mag). I now remember it being in print...

[noiseredux]

Noizzzzzzzze - are you pimping this at all in social media circles or seeing a lot of traffic via word press?

Have some great material (I didn't buy Burger Time after reading Dave's review) out there, alert the masses!

I don't know what's good for hits. I think I average around 150+ hits a week. Is that anything? I haven't really promoted much outside of here yet. Just trying to get a good foundation going right now.

[retrosportsgamer]

Noizzzzzzzze - are you pimping this at all in social media circles or seeing a lot of traffic via word press?

Have some great material (I didn't buy Burger Time after reading Dave's review) out there, alert the masses!

I don't know what's good for hits. I think I average around 150+ hits a week. Is that anything? I haven't really promoted much outside of here yet. Just trying to get a good foundation going right now.

I would probably add tags to the articles and also consider using the "More" feature so the entirity of every article is not on the front page.

[noiseredux]

I would probably add tags to the articles and also consider using the "More" feature so the entirity of every article is not on the front page.

Actually,

I keep tags to a minimum. So far there's Review, Essay, Feature, Interview tags. But I don't really like when you go to a site and there's like hundreds of tags to go through. I kind of like the idea of it just being a simple handful of categories.

I also purposefully avoid the "more" thing because I actually want YSG to not really feel like a blog. I embrace publishing long pieces and don't really want it to look like a site you'd come to get read quick headlines, but rather someplace you'd come to read and lose track of time for a while.

[retrosportsgamer]

Categories (I agree) and Tags are two different things. I definitely dislike sites that have multiple categories and then a glut of folders on the right. I haven't even figured out a good way to categorize my stuff yet.

I use tags strictly for search engine hits.

[BrokenGeode]

Awesome, I'm gonna go over there right now! I wonder how much those original YSG mags are worth though? I'd be interested to see some of them.

[Erik_Twice]

I don't know what's good for hits. I think I average around 150+ hits a week. Is that anything? I haven't really promoted much outside of here yet. Just trying to get a good foundation going right now.

I don't really know, frankly but it's solid. I think the number of views greatly depends on having new content but for some kind of search engine logic, not because people come back.

For the record, I had almost 200 last week but it's a lot compared to previous weeks, where I didn't update at all and didn't hit 100 (I almost double last month's number of hits) . Anyways, the weekly numbers will change a lot for no apparent reason and you will soon discover many hits are caused by bots because suddenly 40 people see your blog at the same time.


I would add more tags. Tags are used for search engines so they should be good and diverse. I have to say I'm terrible at it, it's hard to find some of my stuff tough others are quite high in google for what they are.

Categories, on the other hand, are only for your site. I divided my articles in categories and wrote a page to archive them so you can look around, I think it gives the site a more serious feel with scrolling down as some sort of random article generator and the tabs on top as the fast way to find what you are looking for.

This takes some time but it's worth it. A clean, serious-looking blog goes a long way. And the longer you take to do it, the more annoying it will be.

[retrosportsgamer]

I divided my articles in categories and wrote a page to archive them

Yeah, I need to do this to run across the top. I think wordpress even has "archive" logic built into one of the "new page" options.

I also like the "Most Popular Posts" widget as it calculates on a 24-48 hour basis so when you get random hits to just you front page, they may see 5 different articles highlighted on the right. It's helped drive additional clicks for me.

I get a ton of hits daily for Double Dribble Fastbreak, including at least 10 click throughs on the one .jpeg. I think people think it is the actual javascript game built into my site. This has gone on for weeks now.

[noiseredux]

Yeah, I need to do this to run across the top.

that's kind of what I'm thinking, yeah. Like I said, even though YSG is technically a blog, I don't want it to feel "bloggy."