Tag Archives: statistics

Blogging

Post #1,100; What’s Next?

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Wow, I’ve reached post #1,100; I guess I have shown that I can continue writing stuff after all. 🙂 And since I changed up how I talk about these milestones last time, I’ll continue with some changes, but no video this time around.

Let’s talk about the past almost 5 months. This is the longest it’s taken me to get through 100 posts. I have to admit that I did it on purpose after thinking a little bit.

In the days just before that 1,000th post I had written my pillar post on Better Blogging, which I turned into 2 posts, and decided to give it a little bit of space since each of them was pretty long. I started thinking that I often write some fairly long posts, and that it might take people a day or two to get through them, if they read them at all. Then I started thinking that it wouldn’t hurt every once in awhile to put some space between posts as compared to writing something every single day.

So I started doing that, and initially my visit numbers dropped. But eventually those numbers started to increase as folks realized they now had time to comment on more than one post because they weren’t being bombarded by too many posts at once. Still, since it didn’t take me 180 days to write 100 posts, it means that I still had enough posts that came daily. But the mix is better and truthfully, the pressure’s off in having to have a daily post here.

And there were some outside things as well. My finance blog has started generating income, and that’s not a bad thing. But it takes management time, and though I accept guest posts on that blog, I have my own personal rule that says I won’t have 2 guest posts in a row. I’ve also worked on upping the frequency of my business blog, which I felt was important because I write a lot of posts on leadership topics and one can’t be a leader if one isn’t visible.

Overall I’ve stayed true to my supposed mission here. I wrote 23 posts within the category of blogging, 23, and social media, 13. The rest were a nice mixture of topics, and that’s what I have always hoped to do. With some of those social media posts moving to the new blog, that might decline, but you never know. My main goal for this blog has always been about entertaining and educating folks whenever I can.

It’s never really been about making money here, even though I have my books that I’m promoting and a couple of banners here and there. I’ve removed most of them, though, but I’m not promising I won’t have advertisements on this page, as I was contacted by someone recently that wanted to advertise here; I just didn’t think what they wanted to advertise really fit this blog. However, I’m not above making money; y’all know that. 🙂

A couple more things about the last 100 posts. It was gratifying to see that my post highlighting 21 Top Black Social Media Influencers was in the top 5 of my posts for visitors during this period. It was the only post written during the period that made the top 10, and only 3 posts during the period made the top 20, with the other two being Why’s It Hard To Trust People and Finish Line Steals My Money Then Cancels My Account; yeah, I busted on some affiliates this past period and it’s left me wondering about the state of affiliate marketing.

What’s my expectation in the next 100 posts? I’ll probably continue writing the same types of things I’ve been writing about for the most part. I will be trying to drive more traffic to my other websites, though, and I will be trying to generate more income. I will probably talk more about the concepts of blogging and money, but this won’t become a “make money” blog because I don’t believe anyone can really write about that subject unless they’re making money at it, and I mean more than the little bit I’m making now. I will continue calling things as I see them and motivating folks to be the best they can be. And I will add more videos, since some of you asked for them and I realized I only had one in the last 100 posts; shame on me.

I hope you continue visiting this blog, I hope you visit my other blogs,and I hope we all make it to the top together. Thanks for reading.
 

SEO

SEO Doctor

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From Kristi’s most recent Fetching Friday post came an article from Search Engine Journal on a Firefox plugin called SEO Doctor. In essence, it gives you a heck of a lot of information on how your SEO efforts are working on your website, and if you know how to dig deeper, might give you some indications of what you can do better.

After checkout out the article, I went to the page, downloaded the plugin, and of course added it to my browser, where it’s sitting at the lower left as I type. The biggies, as it pertains to what you want to know, are: the percentage, out of 100%, of effectiveness your page is in its SEO efforts; the number of external links and links overall on that page; and the number of visits that page has received.

When I go to my main business site, it’s ranked at 96% out of 100%; I like that. Some of my other pages on that site are perfect, and I like that even better. The worst page on that site comes in at 90%. It shows me I have 3 external links and 43 links overall; I had to go counting to find those links overall, but they’re there. It shows me… well, it shows me nothing as it pertains to visits. That’s because you have to belong to Compete, and you have to have an API key to pop in, and of course I’m not signing up for that. I wish I could change it to something else, but I’m stuck with that; oh well…

There are two other things on the toolbar as well. One is something called Flow, which measures the percentage of page rank you’re retaining on your site. Since y’all know I don’t particularly follow page rank all that much, I’m not worried about it, which is why it’s not in my top 3. However, on my business page it says I’m retaining 88% of my page rank. The last thing is this little green tab to the far right, which allows me to track nofollow links if I so choose; I don’t at this juncture, but it’s neat enough to take a quick look at.

Finally, you can right click on any of the information listed and get even more information, which you can download if you prefer in a .csv format. Of course, if you have nothing in Compete, that one won’t work.

Anyway, it’s a neat little tool you might want to check out, but of course you have to be on Firefox to use it.

Research

Post #601 – Time For More Changes

19 Comments

Wow, 600 posts, and I’m still going relatively strong. I didn’t quite hit the date I had expected to hit when I wrote post #501, but I’m close to that date, and I feel good about where I am, so it’s all good.

IMG_20140508_204242
Look tired don’t I?

When I wrote post #500, I said I was going to start being a bit more personal on this blog, and it seems that I have been. It’s translated to more visitors, which makes me feel like it was the right way to go. Here were my top 5 topics for the last 100 articles:

Blogging – 30

Personal – 10

Product – 8

Entertainment – 7

Research – 6

It’s the first time entertainment has shown up on my top lists, but I enjoy those posts, though they take the longest to do, what with my looking for videos and products to shill. It does seem to be true, however, that list posts get a lot of attention, even if not always a lot of commentary. This leads to the topic of my most popular posts during the time period, and once again, most of the most popular were posts written beforehand. As a matter of fact, one that’s popped out of nowhere was written in April 2008! Here they are, and, for a change, when they were written:

Getting Google Desktop To Index Thunderbird 406 visits, 12/2008

Top 100 Singers Of All Time 272 visits, 01/2009

WordPress 2.9 Upgrade; My Issues 120 visits, new!

Watch Out For Secret Shopper Scams 119 visits, 4/2008

Isn’t that incredible? I wonder what’s going on that so many people still need help with that older stuff. Next, my most commented on articles during the last 100 posts:

My Top 10 Favorite TV Shows – 41

Trying To Understand Squeeze Pages – 40

Beyond Blogging – 36

It Pays To Be Bad Sometimes – 32

Limit Login Attempts – 31

Those are the stats I wanted to share with you. I could look at plenty more, but I want to go in a different direction, to let you know what’s coming.

I don’t make money off this blog; that doesn’t mean I can’t. However, what’s a bit more important is streamlining a few things and promoting some other things better. So, here’s what’s coming, if I haven’t already made the changes when you read this.

A lot of the banner ads are going away. I’m probably keeping the one at the top and maybe one on the side, but that’s it. My hope is that some of my remaining real estate will look like a prime place for advertisers at some point, but initially it’s going to clean up the page a little bit. The books are going to remain, but I might repackage how they look on the site, if it fits.

I’m going to add an area where all the products or things I positively review will be listed, with a link to that review. I think those things deserve to be sitting out here more prominently, especially a product like Mailwasher. Usually when we write about these things they only remain prominent for a short period of time, then get lost in the abyss of newer posts. That seems like a smart business move.

I’m also probably going to add back Google Adsense to this blog, which I removed a long time ago. I’ll probably go with a smaller ad than that long one I’ve had before, just to have something here. If people are looking for topics I hadn’t thought about before on this blog, maybe they’ll be the ones who’ll find what they’re looking for on Adsense, right?

And some of the “trinkets” things to the right I’m probably going to remove as well. Not all of them, but some, like the one presently saying my blog is ranked #254 on Winning the Web, will be gone, mainly because if you click on it and go to their site, it pops up this book thing that sometimes won’t go away even when you hit close, and if it’s irritating me then it will probably be irritating others as well.

I appreciate every one of you for checking in with me from time to time, and I hope to find even more things that add value to your online or offline experiences. Most of all, I want to be at least someone entertaining; nothing worse than a lot of boring stuff. Now, it’s still my blog, which means I’ll put on here whatever I want to put on here, but it doesn’t mean I might not entertain thoughts here and there; just be ready for me to debate you on them. 🙂

Onward and upward, as we head towards #700.