Well, that’s that! A month of daily content at Longbox Graveyard.

Comics A-To-Z was half-gimmick/half-sincere attempt to jumpstart this blog (and my blogging habits). I rate it … a half-success!

WHAT WORKED

Views!

Daily content goosed my views here at Longbox Graveyard. Even with a short month, February 2018 is tracking to be my best month since November of 2016. Traffic is up 70% from January, when I didn’t post any new content at all.

So, new content = increased views.

(In other news, water is wet).

tell me something I didn’t know

Engagement!

I positioned this blog series as a conversation prompt, and it worked — pretty much every post drew reader comments, here and on Twitter, and it was a joy to correspond with readers old and new over the comic of the day. It was especially good to see some old names pop up. With such low-stakes subject matter the conversation is about what I was hoping for, too — just well-intentioned fans sharing their own favorite comics series, or reminiscing about what made a day’s entry resonate with them. Good stuff.

nice to see you

Twitter!

Like this blog, my Twitter channel has been neglected as of late, and Comics A-To-Z helped bring it back a bit. My analytics show the usual slow decay of Followers but anecdotally I know I’ve been on that service a lot more in the past month, and I discussed comics to a decent degree over there. There’s a lot of overlap between this blog and my Twitter presence but it isn’t 100%, so it is nice to reach people that might not otherwise comment at Longbox Graveyard.

I will also be memorializing this month’s project with my first “Twitter Moment,” so we will see how that goes.

always happy to hear from readers

WHAT DIDN’T WORK

Daily Blogging!

Setting aside that I may have lost people by blowing up their In-Box, or that this past month’s articles at Longbox Graveyard were even more ephemeral than usual, blogging every day might not have been the brightest idea because it didn’t quite do the job of rebuilding my blogging habit. And that’s largely because this daily blog was anything but daily for me.

The series was front-loaded — pretty much the entire thing was written over a long weekend a month ago, then scheduled for daily publication. This isn’t a bad thing — I’ve run the blog like this for years — but it didn’t do much to exercise my blogging muscles.

Mostly this was down to necessity. February was a month of upheaval for my secret identity. While Comics A-To-Z rolled out each day on Longbox Graveyard, in the background I was flying back and forth between Vancouver and California, quitting my job, packing my apartment into the back of my car, and then driving 1300 miles south from British Columbia and back to my old place in Southern California. Mix in some job interviews and a new job starting next week and you can see it was an eventful month. (And if you were wondering why my comment replies came in big waves, rather than day-by-day, now you know).

Anyway, I come out of the last month resolved to keep blogging at Longbox Graveyard, but whether I set my frequency at “Every Damn Day” or “Whenever The Infrequent Whim Strikes” remains to be seen.

I will get things dialed in eventually (or maybe I won’t)

WHAT’S NEXT?

I dunno. I have some ideas. I’ll be back in March! (But not every day).

Thanks for reading and commenting!