Two months on... a reflection

After being a fan of The Sims franchise for 14 years, I’m surprised talking about it doesn’t bore me yet! I began creating this blog two months ago (for a university assignment as many of you know) and it has personally benefitted me in ways beyond my expectations. In this blog I am going to be reflecting on my journey, discussing my initial strategy for the blog along with the future of it.

Starting with my initial strategy – I used the RACE model (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012) to identify the actions I was to take. To reach my audience I created a Twitter account to use alongside the blog, I had engaged with The Sims community prior to the blog on this platform so I knew that it was the most saturated with my target audience. For the act stage, I began building a following and engaging with those followers – retweeting their content, liking their posts. During the convert stage, I began promoting my own content in order to get traffic to the blog. In the final stage, engage - and something I am still doing – is building a relationship with potential blog readers, in this case because I am equally interested in their content, we are able to help one another mutually. 

The content that I produced on Twitter, I aimed to be more low-key and personal, promoting the blog every now and again, not to push it on my followers too much. As I write this, I’ve just hit 300 followers which I intend to continue to grow. The following screenshot is an example of my tweet impressions – one having a link to the blog and the other just generic content.

These numbers are what my impressions range between. From those I’ve spoken with on Twitter, many are from various countries and therefore, I had to be considerate of my posting times to get better engagement – I found the evening to be more successful. 

Looking at the blog itself I created a simple site map at the beginning to aim for. One thing I wanted for the blog was to try and reduce the bounce rate and keep people on my site. As shown below, any links in the blogs directed the reader to a separate resource page, which they then could find the external link on. These in-site referrals are a good way of maintaining a low rate by funnelling visitors through the pages (Cameron-Kitchen, 2016).

I find the analytics on Wix to be limiting. Having used other blogging platforms in the past, I expected more metrics on the location of my viewers and the most popular times to post. Since setting the blog up I have had a total on 127 unique visitors, who mainly were referred from promotional posts on Twitter and shares through Discord channels dedicated to The Sims. My bounce rate is currently at 53%, which I am satisfied with at the moment because I often just link the newest blog, so it is likely that people are exploring more of my site or my aim for the resource page is working. 

Even now I am still having a few issues with using the platform. The biggest one is currently the about section appearing above every blog (unexplainable and something that Wix is working on fixing for me). This could potentially affect the amount of time visitors stay on my site, if the blog they clicked to view doesn’t appear immediately then gratification levels decrease and the likelihood of them bouncing off is higher. 

Looking towards the future, I will be continuing this blog as the topic is something I am really passionate about. At the start of this, in order to write about the franchise, I sought permission from EA to reproduce their materials. The permission I received explicitly allowed me to produce a non-commercial blog site, and for the assignment this was fine. Going forward, I will be looking into extending my permissions so that I can set up an exclusive ‘What the Plumbob?’ domain, along with advertising on the site and through blog posts as well as being able to put money into an SEO plan. My objectives are to continue increasing traffic to the blog, along with engagement on Twitter. I am also looking at using different media to engage people who don’t enjoy written pieces and expanding the blog. 

For now I’ll get planning some more content and exploring new ways of keeping it interesting. Hopefully, if you’ve ever considered your own blog, this reflection helps you in some way to get one up and running!