(This article is Part 3 of a series. For the first installment, click here.)
Hello, loyal readers, and welcome to Week Three of the Great Blue Check Experiment! In case you’re new here, I’m your host, @gnerphk on TwiX and J. Millard Simpson on any site that publishes my fiction. I’m coming to you today thanks to the wonders of caffeine overdose, having only just met a 4000-word short deadline that may or may not sell. Don’t blame me if the letters shake; blame the stimulants.
As you may recall, in the first article I discussed getting story clicks; in the second, the effects of being classed as “potentially abusive content”. Today I’d like to talk a bit more about the revised System, time-and-effort efficiency, and clickthrough rates.
But first, I want to discuss the benefits of having loyal online friends.
Not loyal Followers, mind you. Those either come in time or they don’t. No, I’m talking about real living breathing people you know who also do the TwiX thing and are willing to support you on occasion with rePosts and the odd comment.
I happen to be RL friends with a very talented artist and published author. Our online circles are very different; she caters to temperamental artists, while I attract other cranky writers and critical thinkers. She posts with her heart and I post with my mind, and it’s only right that we have very different Followings.
What that means, though, is that every time I post one of her book links, she gets exposed to hundreds of people who’ve never heard of her. And every time she posts one of my stories, I get exposed to thousands. (She’s got an awful lot more Followers than I do. She’s been doing this for a very long time.)
This experiment was designed primarily to promote my SciFi Shorts stories, which come out on an irregular schedule. It works out to about one every week or so. When I Post the link, the Algorithm buries it — but as soon as a couple of people Reply and Like it, the Algorithm boosts it. Thus, if ten fellow SFS writers were to sign in every couple of days and Like and Reply to my SFS story links, and I to theirs, tens of thousands of people would see us and we’d all get rich and famous.
(Well, no. We’re writers. “Less poor and famous” is really the best we can reasonably hope for.)
Speaking of clicks: The more comments a post gets, the more exposure it receives and thus the more clicks it earns. About one in a hundred viewers actually clicks through. I’ve experimented with other formats, and they don’t work; the ideal is to give the useful information (“I (or my friend) wrote this; it’s very good; the link is free”) and maybe the subtitle or first line above the link.
And make sure your friends know to RT, Like, and Reply.
Efficiency is key to success here. All you have to invest is your time, and if you spend it doomscrolling and engaging in flame wars, you’ll have wasted it. Make a short List of creators you want to boost (ideally those who want to boost you; it’s worth discussing it and sharing the List) and visit them twice a day, morning and night. Have a file of memes and/or pictures you can pull from and put up one whenever you log in (or, if you want to get fancy, there are apps that schedule posts for you so you can go live your life). If you have plenty of free time, Reply to everyone who engages with your content, even if it’s only a smile emoji and a “Thanks for reading!”
And play the System.
My System is pretty simple: I keep a List which contains the top news sources, plus half a dozen commentators that have consistently high traffic. I sign in, ideally, for fifteen minute sessions six times a day at key hours. Every time a commentator posts and it’s worthy of discussion, I post a Reply, whether a throwaway one-liner witticism or an amusing GIF. Each one of these takes me about fifteen seconds, and each earns me on average a thousand Impressions. At that rate, if that’s all I ever do and Post nothing of my own, being just a Reply Guy gets me to my Ad Share target of 5 million in ~210 hours of TwiXing over three months. Combined with my own content and friend-boosting, it’s about half that much time.
The down side is, I expect to only pull in about $50 in exchange for my hundred hours, an amount that will grow only gradually with my Following, to double in six months to a year if I stick to it. Fifty cents an hour is a lousy rate of pay even for a writer. If this didn’t draw clicks to my content, it wouldn’t be worth doing. But it does.
I’m a decent writer, so wit comes naturally (if sometimes painfully). Witty Replies draw Impressions, but truly funny or meaningful ones bring in Comments, Likes, rePosts, and above all Profile Clicks and Follows. Each of these boosts my profile in the Algorithm, and each of the last two brings Impressions on my own content and occasionally Clicks on my story links. That last is what I’m after.
Which brings me naturally to…
How it’s going:
We left off the last article on Day 16, which was an inactive day that netted me very few Impressions.
Day 17: It’s a Thursday, which is evidently normal traffic. I tried being highly active through the night, just to test it, and got almost no Interactions for my trouble (but a few Follows, which is something). Things got really dead from 3-6am EST. Over the course of the day, however, a couple of comments drew tens of thousands of Impressions. One was “Oops.” The other was “Not surprising” followed by an emoji. I spent the hours from 2pm to 6 constantly engaging, which was fun but got me very few Impressions, especially by comparison.
Day 18: This was my first day with the System, and it worked like a charm. I dropped a SFS story link and a TNFN article, and each earned a bunch of clickthroughs, but only because of traffic from my Replies. 150k+ at end of day.
Day 19: Refined the System, built my List. Nearly 200 Follows in two days. Won a contest and got a Follow from Andrew Yang, which was fun. Almost 150k EoD.
Day 20: Things slow down on Saturday nights, it appears. Maybe this will change during the school year. Still, hits from Saturday’s activity keep accumulating heavily until about 0330. Morning is slow, but from eleven to three things took off. 371472 EoD!
Day 21: Sunday night there’s a hurricane hitting California, so for once it’s not dead. Over 130k at 10am and 255774 EoD.
Day 22: Confined activity to morning, noon, and evening, with a total of two hours among 7 sessions. 251867 EoD. Discovered that YouTube and article site links get deprecated by the Algorithm unless they have significant Likes, Replies, and RTs.
Day 23: Spent several hours in an active political debate during the evening. I earned a disturbing percentage of my first 80k Impressions personally through discussion. I also drew scores of Blocks, which in a few days will have impacted my visibility. My article link, though, pulled a lot of views; I tried an experimental approach and it seems to have worked… a little. Having a friend boost it helped a lot more. 309168 EoD.
Day 24: Block slowdown hits. I’m active at all hours, monitoring numbers, and score only 231944 EoD. 1000 Followers, which is 100 in five days… slow, but steady, and all organic. For next week, I’ll try narrowing down time-of-day stats.
It’s been a couple of days since then; as I mentioned, I had a deadline. I’ve been tracking the performance of comments vs. GIFs, and thoughtful discussion vs. one-liners. More on that next week.
Incidentally: Someone bought me a coffee from a Twitter clickthrough to TNFN. Only one, but it’s more than I’ve seen here in months. (I’m presently drinking tea. It’s much cheaper than coffee, but has almost no flavor by comparison. I blame you guys — and the crappy economy.)
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