First off, I just want to thank everybody that stopped by this week and read my
Getting Serious Posts. I am overwhelmed and humbled by the comments you left me on my blog, Facebook, Twitter and Deviantart. I never imagined that so many of you would respond in such a positive way. If I didn't respond you directly, I am sorry, I didn't expect so many and I tried to keep up with them all. Like I said, I was a bit worried that I was over sharing and putting myself out on the internet to become a target. One must only look to the comments on Youtube to know what I am taking about. Again, thank you very much, I am just happy I can give back to the community in this way after so many of you have helped me this past year. Let us hope for an amazing 2010 for all of us!
Secondly, (I am a week behind on this) the good folks at the Ninja Mountain put out a call for artist to submit pieces to be critiqued on their Podcast. A critique by your peers is always something to be sought out so I jumped at the opportunity. Last week they critiqued a piece I did for the Dragon Magazine article,
Barbarian Essentials. It was a great critique, they pointed out some things I had already heard about the piece as well as some new areas I should address in future work. The newest Ninja to join their ranks,
Drew Baker, went that extra mile and gave me some additional notes and did a paint over of the piece to show me what he meant. Now that is a critique! Many thanks to Drew, Patrick, Jeremy, and Socar for taking the time to help me with my work. I look forward to taking giving the piece a little more love and sharing it with everyone. You can hear my critique, as well as four others on
Ninja Mountain #46.
Dragon Rage Barbarian© 2009 Wizards of the Coast LLCLastly, I have been popping up elsewhere on the web this week and I wanted to show you how that relates to some of the things I talked about in my
Getting Serious post. If you missed it, Jon Schindehette mentioned my Getting Serious posts on Wednesday's Artorder,
Trying to get inspired. Again on Thursday, Jon mentioned me on a post about
Standing out. This time around he was talking about this years holiday card that I sent out. Both times he was kind enough to link to my blog and or website.
I did send him an email letting him know that I had put up my posts that mentioned him and Artorder. The mention of the card was out of the blue and very appreciated. Please do not take this as an open endorsement to spam Jon with everything you do. That would fall under the areas of not acting professional around the client and being an asshole. I just want to show how these kind of additional promotions online can affect your traffic.
Blog traffic from 1/1/2010 through 1/8/2010 (as of 8:00 am EST)
(a) Friday through Sunday: I made no attempts to promote my blog. I was taking a break from my work and the internet as well as it was a holiday. The traffic I was receiving was from random searches and from people catching up on their blog. These days were below average for my blog.
(b) Monday: Getting serious part 1 posted. I promoted on Twitter and Facebook. I had several retweets and some additional promotion on the web by others. This day was above average for a day I post on my blog.
(c) Tuesday: No promotion. This is a completely average day. I did see some traffic coming in from others posts regarding Monday.
(d) Wednesday: Getting serious part 2 posted. Promoted on Twitter and Facebook. Was mentioned on Artorder. I was heavily retweeted and had much more additional promotion and posting on others blogs and Deviantart journal entries. I had a lot of correspondence with people, which was really cool. I even had some art directors that I work with drop me notes to tell me they enjoyed the posts. This was an exceptional day for traffic. I can't ask for a better day.
(e) Thursday: Promoted posts on my Deviantart page. Was mentioned again on Artorder. Saw a lot of residual traffic coming to the Getting Serious post from many other blogs, journals and twitter accounts. A really good day for traffic.
(f) Friday: Still early but already off to a good start. Will be prompting this post on Twitter and Facebook once it goes live.
What does all this equate to? Still learning. I hopefully helped some folks in my own way, which was the goal. I know a lot of people came to my blog and my website, which is usually good. I hope this at least shows how the pieces begin to work together. How the internet and lines of communications can benefit all of us.
I think that is enough for one week. I will be back next week with some art and images, until then...
Dragon Rage Barbarian
