March Poll - Finding BLMA

Time for another poll and this time I'm asking the question, How did you first 'discover' BigLee's Miniature Adventures? Even if you're not a follower and this is your first visit I'd be interested to know how you landed on my blog. In effect I'm asking you the readers to help me identify the best way to promote and grow this blog in the future.

This weeks I've spoken to several other bloggers about the benefits of the 'online community' and the interconnectivity of our sites. I suspect that many of the sites followers first stumbled on BLMA through a link on another sites blogroll. This is why I keep a blogroll in the sidebar of this page, as I think its a great way to build connections and meet new gamers.

Another tool I use regularly are hobby forum sites like The Miniatures Page or the Lead Adventure Forum or even the Flames of War Forum. I'm definitely a lurker of these sites most of the time (not enough hours in the day to write on every site regularly) but now and again I post comments or 'advertise' my site via a blog update announcement. Its easy to overdo this route so I keep such posts to a minimum and target selected forums depending on the nature of the announcement. This approach certainly generates a lot of traffic on my blog and its quite likely this is the source of first contact for many of this sites readers.

Of course the main way people find most sites is via search engines like Google or Ask. This is where high traffic utility posts come in useful. These have lots of keywords and links in them and are the worm on the end of the hook drawing new readers to the site. Hopefully these new readers don't recoil in horror when they land on BLMA and maybe they stay a while and look around before moving on. I use Statcounter to record site hits but it also records visit duration statistics. When I first started BLMA up to 75% of new visitors only lingered on the site for less than 30 seconds. That percentage has dropped to 40-45% meaning when random visitors drop in they are finding something of interest to keep them around longer.

Another important source of site hits - and hopefully new followers - are social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg or Delicious. I've been using these myself for years now and found several interesting sites through this route. This pathway has been made easier by the fact that most sites (my own included) provide fast and easy links to bookmarking sites and to social network sites like facebook.

They may be other ways that readers arrive here, and I'd be interested to learn what these are. As always your comments and discussion are very much appreciated and of course I'll post the final results in the comments section below after the poll closes.