Two years ago today, I started Must Contain Minis with its first post. Today, Must Contain Minis turns two!

In that time, I posted 326 articles about gaming and thousands of photos. The site itself constantly looks more and more professional and I also started writing for the Bell of Lost Souls (the biggest Warhammer Rumors Website that I know). Over the past year, I migrated to WordPress (from Blogger) and invested a little into camera equipment, which makes a huge difference!

In last year’s anniversary post, I discussed a little about myself, gave some “shout-outs” to people that have helped the site, and answered three frequently asked questions. This year, we are going to look at our web statistics and a list of the most popular posts on the site (visited between May 19, 2017 and May 19, 2018).

Before I begin, I do want to follow up on one of the frequently asked questions from last year’s post about whether I plan to get into YouTube. In that post, I discussed that I might get into YouTube during the Fall of 2017. That never happened. YouTube is still a direction that I eventually want to move towards, but, at this time, I don’t have the time.

Top 8 Posts

Over the past year, we made a number of great posts. Our most popular posts this year, in reverse order, includes…

Number 8 – Review of Frostgrave Cultists

Number 7 – Review of Blood and Plunder

Number 6 – Spotlight on Gaslands

Number 5 – Review of Frostgrave Barbarians

Number 4 – Review of Market Garden for Bolt Action

Number 3 – Review of Rogue Stars

Number 2 – Scratch built 28mm Jungle Terrain

Number 1 – Hobbit Battle Boards at Hotlead

I find it interesting that Rogue Stars is still on the list because it was published in 2016. It is also cool that five of the top eight posts happen to be reviews. Interesting enough, my 16th most visited post (or page) is my Reviews Page.

Overall, we have had a very good year and I am proud of all the achievements that we made.

Statistics

This year, we saw a drastic decrease in traffic coming from Facebook. I found this extremely concerning as I used Facebook to attract the bulk of my readers in my early days. In trying to attract new readers, we experimented with a number of different strategies across various social media platforms. At the time, we basically looked at Must Contain Minis as a publisher (or magazine) pushing content to as many readers as possible through social media. On that post, Rob Manuel of Geek and Sundry left a really good comment that changed our perspective on our approach.

We still focus strongly on Facebook, but have taken a different approach in that we are trying to engage with our audience more and are sharing more than just links. Lately our Facebook statistics have been up again, and we got a real boost of readers from the Google Search Engine.

Over the past year, we have reached roughly 48,000 different readers giving us over 106,000 pages views on this website.  Please keep in mind that we experienced a serious dip in numbers when Facebook changed the way they share posts. That said, we rebounded over the past few months and found many additional visitors from Google to help offset the loss. In April alone, we saw 6,167 visitors bringing in a total of 13,932 page views. Being fairly young website, we hope to see those numbers climb even more.

The Future…

The immediate future ahead of me is extremely busy indeed. I have a number of external factors drawing on the time that I would have otherwise spent writing for this website. One of those items is that I started an IT Course for CompTIA’s Network+, which runs until August. Despite being busy, I still plan to keep Must Contain Minis up and running strong while growing the site even more!!!

For the short term, I still have to figure out what my course and other changes mean. It may meant that I have to reduce my frequency of posts or their length. That said, I have tons of planned content and pictures ready to go for a number of posts.

Until next time, Happy Gaming Everyone!!!