Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

In terms of traffic, the just-concluded April was the best month yet for Byzantium's Shores. This is almost entirely due to my April Fool's Day post of "Even More Turgid Steven Den Beste", which was noticed and linked by Matthew Yglesias. If my traffic pattern holds, I can expect to fall a bit in May and then rise again in June. (However, my April spike was so large that it might take a while to really rise up to that level again.)

There have been a couple of essays appearing in Blogistan the last few days about weblog promotion (Truth Laid Bear and Volokh, mainly). While I check my stats several times a day (yeah, that sounds nerdy, but it takes all of six seconds to do so; I spend more time than that each day just standing with the refridgerator door open trying to remember why the hell I went to the kitchen in the first place), I've generally shied away from "direct promotion" of what I do here. I've never sent any e-mails directly asking for links, although I have done the "Hey, I wrote a post in which I comment on what you said the other day, and here's the link to that post" thing a couple of times. (It hasn't worked, but then, on the handful of times I've tried this tactic it's been with the "biggies" who probably get several dozen such messages each day.) I leave comments on other blogs, but judging by my referral history, that's a lousy way to generate traffic, and I don't leave comments in hopes of generating traffic, anyway.

So basically I operate on the "Just keep doing the best I can and hope people like it" style of promotion. I do wonder sometimes if my general subject matter doesn't have enough wider appeal, and my political content -- while more frequent these days -- still isn't my primary focus (nor, really, do I expect it to ever be, even if I've generally abandoned my former, strict "No politics here" policy). Generally I try to enhance what SDB calls the "stickiness" of Byzantium's Shores.

That said, a few random traffic-related thoughts abound....

:: I recall reading, somewhere recently, that Saturdays generally see the most traffic on the Net. If that's true, you sure can't prove it by my traffic patterns. My hits always drop like a rock on Saturdays.

:: SDB also redid his blogroll this week. Unsurprisingly, I didn't make the cut, since I'm not a Jacksonian. I'm an Arthurian. (King Arthur, not Chester Arthur.)

:: (Yes, I know that is the single worst joke I have inflicted upon my readers in all the time I've been doing this. But in Blogistan, nobody can hear you groan....)

:: Yeah, I know I said above that I never beg directly for permalinks. But you know, maybe all those people who link to William Burton could change that link to me, since (a) Burton hasn't posted anything new in almost three months and (b) alphabetically, Byzantium's Shores would fall in about the same place on those blogrolls. Come on, folks!