This work by Matt LeVeque is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Nov
1
Novel Writing, Google Analytics & Seasonality
November 1, 2008 |
IT IS NOVEMBER 1st and that can only mean a few things - it’s cold here in Philly, Eagles fans are getting restless at 4-3 and it’s less than 4 days until election day - gosh, I am really going to miss all those campaign ads… November 1st also is the start of National Novel Writing Month - NaNoWriMo an online writing project hosted by The Office of Letters and Light.
I am not a novelist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do enjoy non-profit projects like NaNoWriMo and Project 826. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to basically write a 50,000 word novel by midnight November 30. And who does it benefit besides aspiring authors? Disclosed on their website:
NaNoWriMo and the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program are both run by the Office of Letters and Light, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity. Your donations to the Office of Letters and Light pay for NaNoWriMo’s youth and adult novel-writing programs, as well as the Office of Letters and Light’s operating expenses.
In his recent post ‘a post for all the stats nerds out there’ on the NaNoWriMo blog, Chris Baty writes about the wild trends of website traffic by analyzing Google Analytics data. He describes the web traffic as ‘weird’ compared to other sites since there is a very gradual increase in traffic leading up to the end of October, a massive spike in traffic for 4 days between the end of October/beginning of November, and then a gradual decline in traffic into December. Analyzing traffic trends like this is interesting since NaNoWriMo is really only geared toward 1 month of the year. Unique? yes. Weird? maybe. Uncommon when considering the seasonality of a website? not really.
All websites have some sort of seasonality trend which forces search engine marketers to be more creative in the ‘off season’. I don’t think we will ever be able to compete with the retail seasonality of ecommerce websites that happens in November to January. This is baked into our culture where companies live or die which is sad because it is not the most effective way to run a business and remain sane. Engaging your current and potential customers through-out the entire year would be a much more sustainable strategy than betting the farm on 2 months out of the year.
In any case, regardless of seasonality, this is National Novel Writing Month - NaNoWriMo.org’s time to shine for a great cause. Here’s hoping Chris and the team at The Office of Letters and Light have another successful November.
Related Tools
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
