5 years of blog growth, and the future of Roll to Review

It’s rare for bloggers to divulge their stats. Making it hard as a blogger to compare your site with others. So you’re always wondering how your blog growth is going. Is it on par? Is it terrible? You never know.

So whenever I come across articles that candidly show their stats I enjoy them because it gives me insight into how I’m doing. However, there’s the big fat caveat of different blogs growing at different rates due to the niche they’re in and other factors.

With that in mind, this article is going to go deep into the details of Roll to Review, what’s happened so far in its 5-year journey, and what’s to come.

Oh, and there’s going to be plenty of pretty graphs.

What does blog growth look like?

Blog growth comes in a lot of different statistics. But the one statistic that board game publishers and advertisement agencies really care about is page views. This combines the number of visitors you’ve had and the number of pages these visitors have looked at.

Below stands the year-on-year page view totals for Roll to Review. I’m going to go through the different years and explain how we got to where we are now.

Roll to Review started in 2017, a couple of months prior to my son being born. Which in hindsight, was a terrible time to start blogging. However, Roll to Review isn’t my first blog, and I’ve always found writing a satisfying creative outlet.

At the end of 2017, Roll to Review managed to pull 985 page views with only 18 posts available. It brings me great joy that some of the same people who began reading in 2017 are still reading today!

2018 saw me spend too much time on the blog, and not a lot of it was effective. Producing posts that weren’t targeted, and were just there to add content. I put out 65 posts for the year, but in doing so I put a lot of pressure on myself to hit specific deadlines. I ended the year with 11,970 page views.

That’s significant blog growth from 2017.

Therefore, I continued to push myself in 2019. However, blogging at that rate while trying to perform well at my day job, and having a young child was unsustainable. I stopped blogging for a time while I got my world back on track, and the results for the year showed. Roll to Review went backwards to 9,359 views for the year.

This setback was pretty frustrating at the time. Internally I questioned whether it was worth the effort.

So in 2020, I took the year off blogging and focused on my day job. Writing only 3 posts for the 12 months. Yet somehow, Roll to Review still managed 10,925 page views.

In 2021 I got my spark back. Writing 71 articles – the most of any year – and again I was rewarded from a stats perspective. Nearly doubling the previous year with 20,679 page views. But you probably already noticed that this amount of articles is not sustainable.

Meaning we were headed for another crash.

But before that happened, Roll to Review became self-hosted!

This change of web host didn’t stop me from crashing. If anything, it sped it up, as moving the site reset much of my special SEO Google juice. Meaning my page views bottomed out, and I was put back on the starting line. Because of this, I again crashed and lost a couple of months of blogging.

It was around this time that I changed my expectations around blogging.

Before, I wanted to Roll to Review to get big enough so that it appeared in Reddit threads regarding the best board gaming review sites. A lofty goal to be sure.

However, I realised that blogging is my creative outlet. As such, I shouldn’t put all this pressure on delivering posts week after week and hitting my made-up deadlines.

This changed my entire approach to Roll to Review. I’m no longer marching to the beat of an invisible drum, and am now happy to sit on articles for a day or two before posting them.

Anecdotally, I’ve found I now produce better reviews and articles while still maintaining a reasonable schedule. The stats reflect this as well, as we’ve seen a sizable bump in the latter half of 2022.

However, they also reflect the effects of posts going viral.

It’s kind of funny that my initial viral posts had nothing to do with board gaming. That the big spike we see from July in the above graph was due to my ‘How to be a Better Dungeon Master‘ article.

Then the other big bump in December was due to the second season of Alice in Borderlands being released (It was excellent by the way). But it blew up my article on ‘6 Games That Belong in Alice in Borderlands‘ I wrote a year beforehand.

Thanks to these viral articles and some of the SEO work I’ve done in the background, 2022 was a smashing success. With Roll to Review ending the year with 57 articles published, and 87,612 page views.

Leading us to 2023, where I’ve continued to work on SEO for old articles while pushing out a steady stream of new reviews.

This has been a massive effort, with over 100 articles from the archives either edited or rewritten.

However, the results of this work are pretty exciting. As while 2022 smashed all my expectations with 87,000 views. We’ve just passed the midway point in the year and I’ve already hit 89,000 for 2023.

Even more exciting, is that most of these views aren’t being propped up by viral posts. Instead, it’s people viewing the site weekly, or whenever they subscribe and receive a new email from Roll to Review. So even though the graph looks to have plateaued since April. Digging deeper shows the non-viral posts getting more exposure, and the viral posts falling off.

WordPress.com vs self-hosted

If you’re like I was four years ago, then you likely have no idea what I’m talking about. But essentially there are two separate versions of WordPress. There’s WordPress.org, which is a free-to-use blogging application, and WordPress.com where Automattic hosts the WordPress.org application for you.

The latter slims down your customization and configuration options to make it easier to start blogging and allows you to just focus on writing great content. However, in exchange for using their free version, they place ads on your website and suck up all of your potential ad revenue.

Still, it’s a great place to start blogging.

You can also grow your blog on this version, as you’re able to buy your custom domain (i.e. rolltoreview.com not rolltoreview.wordpress.com). As well as any of the plugins in their store.

But at that point, things start to get expensive.

By moving your blog off of WordPress.com you’re making your blogging life exponentially harder. As you now have complete control over your blog, from the files on the system to the security settings to the CSS on the front end.

When I made this move back in 2021, it was immediately apparent that the kiddy gloves were off. The number of things I learnt overnight was staggering. Things no casual hobbyist should ever have to know. And, to be fair, I still don’t know what I’m doing half the time. But thankfully, I’ve found Blue Host to be very helpful in working through some tough issues with me.

However, it’s quite freeing to be in total control. If I see something wrong with my site, I can Google an answer and have it fixed in a matter of hours. By comparison, if I was still hosted on WordPress.com, I wouldn’t be able to do anything but live with the frustration of a dodgy blog.

Blog monetisation: what’s worked and what hasn’t?

Hosting your own website and customizing it in 2023 is as cheap as it has ever been. But it’s still expensive. Between domain registry, hosting, and one plugin for SEO, I’m spending about 300 dollars a year in costs.

And that’s before mentioning the amount I spend on board games!

Although let’s be real, I’d spend that anyway.

Note: We’re about to dive into monetisation, which is kind of a poison word for some. Please note that Roll to Review is not all about the money it isn’t my primary source of income – and probably will never be. However, it needs to be self-sustaining – which at the moment, it isn’t.

Looking into different ways to reclaim that cost, I’ve previously tried the donation route. But in four years of having a donation button, I received 10 dollars. Which is awesome, but at the same time, not enough to break even.

I’ve since added Amazon Affiliate links to reviews and different articles. I like the affiliate approach because it feels like you’re performing a service. Did you like this review, and want to buy to buy the game? Here click this!

From a monetisation perspective, it’s been a mild success. As the graph below shows, I’m now generating 10 dollars a month through affiliate links.

However, there are a few issues with this monetisation approach.

Firstly, Amazon isn’t an expert in board games. So while they have them, there are issues where sometimes:

• They don’t provide the best price
• They don’t have enough stock
• They haven’t even got the game listed

These all affect the conversion rate of people clicking a link to buy stuff, and then them actually buying things on Amazon.

Outside of that, it complicates your content plan. Whereby you need to think about the games you’re reviewing, and whether or not they’re on Amazon. It also makes you only want to review games that you’re going to recommend – as you only get money if someone buys them.

However, like the donation strategy, while this is working to some extent – and that’s awesome! It’s not enough to cover the cost of the site.

So I’ve looked into other forms of monetisation and in my current position…

Ads seem to make a lot of sense.

Moving to ads removes some of that Amazonian pressure, where a voice in the back of my head wondering if the game is on Amazon or not. It also aligns with what I want to do with Roll to Review.

I want people to come and read about their favourite board games.

Not just be a salesperson with a pretty blog.

I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not to add ads over the last couple of weeks, and have pretty much made my mind up to turn to the dark side. If done right it won’t pose too much of an inconvenience, and many successful sites such as Kotaku, and news sites already do this.

What’s next for Roll to Review?

Recently there’s been a lot of changes. You may have noticed the increase in picture quality, as I’ve bought a new phone and lighting setup specifically for taking photos.

Although, the change I’m most proud of is the home page refresh. Heavily inspired by Board Game Quest, it not only looks better than the previous home page, but it also allows me to showcase older reviews and articles. Which by themselves were extremely difficult to discover.

Although, I’m not done in the discovery space just yet.

In the upcoming months, I’m looking to update the Rankings page to include pictures and descriptions. As well as fix up the Reviews page so it’s easier to navigate, and find what you want. I particularly like Shut Up and Sit Down review page and how responsive it is.

From a content perspective, I’m continuing to refresh older articles. But I’m also looking to get rid of some old, no longer relevant, news posts. Replacing them with board game reviews. Specifically, popular games like Settlers of Catan, or The Resistance. Where there’s little to add to the conversation, though adding them to my rankings grounds the list with a game most people know about.

Additionally, I need to flesh out my Best of BGG articles, where 2019 and 2020 are inexplicably missing.

Otherwise, producing reviews and board game articles as per usual. I have the new Dead by Daylight Board Game to review, and my preorder of Heat: Pedal to the Metal should be arriving soon.

Beyond all of this, Roll to Review will be getting ads. Which sucks, I know. But if it pays off, then all money earned will be going straight back into the site.

Here’s my current shopping list:

• A new logo! I’ve been using one made for me by Caleb, an early reader of the blog, for the last 5 years. It’s great, but I have some ideas about what I want to do.
• Pay for an email service, and sort out email subscribers.
• Throw a contest or two, as I’m keen to give back to the people who’ve consistently read my site.

And a lot more…

So exciting times ahead for Roll to Review. It’s been 5 years since I launched the site, and I’m more passionate about it than I have ever been before.

Thanks for reading this long, long article and hope you found it interesting to see the underbelly of Roll to Review. If you do have feedback about the direction of the blog, then feel free to reach out via the contact page, or leave a comment below.