slamboard

A successful marketing campaign on other media, such as television, can have people flocking to Google with search terms that almost nobody is optimized for. It hasn’t happened to me yet. The Kimkins thing wasn’t an accident. I stumbled upon a blog today that is enjoying a peak in curiosity about ’silencing your rooster’ the site is called DeadRooster and it is just some guy trying to be funny. He owes a debt of gratitude to people who make drugs and create wacky advertising campaigns for them.

I live in a neighborhood with actual roosters and they wake me up sometimes. It’s not funny.

If you are reading this post, you are a member of a very small group. I was somewhat surprised to see how quickly traffic dropped as soon as I stopped making posts that were relevant to my core readership.

My core readership for the last year has been been people with an interest in the Kimkins scam. I published Part I well over a year ago. I think I would be doing a service to those people by stating that it is very unlikely that I will have anything else to say on the subject.

I am fascinated by people who decide to become full time bloggers. Jimmy Moore is one example. He has a compelling personal story and an engaging personality, but I’m sure that he would tell anyone who asks that his blogging is HARD work. I like to think that I am smart enough and determined enough to become a professional blogger, but I am far too risk averse.

With fuel costs breaking new records everyday, lots of people are considering curtailing their driving. For some people, this may involve putting a car into storage for months or longer. I was considering it and I realized that there are probably a few things that I should do to the car if I want it to stay in the condition that it is in. Here are a few links with helpful information:

Mothballing your car

AAA has advice that seems to cater to people with really nice cars.

After moving in 2005, we went carless for a whole year. It can be done. I consider my 1990 Skoda to be a time saving device. It is not a necessity and it is not a part of my identity.

I get a trickle of traffic coming to this blog based on searches for lingerie. I have done a handful of reviews on online stores that sell the stuff. I do not pretend to be an expert on lingerie and I may have even misspelled it at some point, which accounts for the search engine traffic that I get from people who are looking for pictures of lingeri.

IZEARANKS.com is new. I took a quick visit to the ranking page for my blog and then I made this graph comparing it to a semi-random selection of blogs. These blogs belong to people that are on the periphery of my networking efforts. I don’t visit these blogs everyday, but I know that the authors take their blogging seriously.

I think that this graph illustrates what you can expect from a ranking system that tracks a relatively small number of blogs. There are several thousand blogs that contain the coding tools from IZEA, but it is small when you compare it to a ranking system like Alexa. A have a virtually abandoned blog that I looked at recently and its Alexa rank is in the tens of millions. Slamboard spent a few days this month in the top 100 with IZEA.

Here are the urls for the blogs that I included on my graph:

http://slamboard.com

http://simplekindoflife.com

http://www.macewan.org

http://www.u-g-h.com

I am way late in making any kind of commentary about John Chow getting manually punished by Google for his not not evil ways, so I won’t bother. I will focus instead on page two of the Google search query for John Chow. It contains an entry for John Chow’s MyBlogLog page and the text blurb is written by John Chow. It is the highest ranking page over which he has any editorial control. His holiday wishes are expressed on this page at this time. I suspect that JohnCow.com is getting more Google traffic than MyBlogLog.com/buzz/community/JohnChow/, but every little bit helps.

The URL for my full name is taken, but I really need to make a point of getting domains for my kids. Having a your name as a URL is a tremendous asset if you don’t blow it by ticking Google off.

An estimated 114 million internet users made purchases online last holiday season. I had pretty obvious motivation for making references to Christmas when I was reviewing products over the last few months. I was surprised to see a recent surge in people finding my blog through a Google search for tasers for women. Is this because I am one of a very small number of people who wrote about this product, or is it actually a popular Christmas gift this year?

I don’t know.

I took a look back at my post about the sleek and stylish Tasers for Women and I did not mention Christmas. I was also very critical of the product.

The Blogger’s Choice Awards was a success for its creator. It was a small ego boost for the winners. I nominated myself for a handful of categories hoping that it would attract a few readers. I didn’t get very many votes.

A big part of the success of the site is owed to the celebrity bloggers that took notice.

There was a fraught competition between supporters of Rosie O’Donnell and Will Wheaton. Will was initially flattered, but he became very critical of the site when he found out that it was affiliated with PayPurrPost. Rosie was more positive about the nomination and expressed the desire to win. Rosie has her detractors as well as her supporters and her page on the BCA site has over 8000 comments. Rosie won.

A very bad man initially had a huge lead in the Worst Blog of All Time category. When he tipped everyone off to the fact that he was happy about all the attention and traffic, things tailed off for him. Unfortunately for him all the attention was ultimately bad for business because his more questionable practices came under the scrutiny of people that were in a position to dam up some of his revenue streams. In the end Perez Hilton was proclaimed the worst. I think that is inaccurate, he is simply the most popular bad blogger.

The BCA’s were not a good traffic generation tool for the everyday blogger, in my opinion. If you were one of the few that got in before the unmoderated nominee lists became huge, you may have gotten a few clicks from people who were not already familiar with your blog. I did not see any sustained traffic benefit from participating in this silly exercise in self promotion and ego fluffing.

SEO tends to focus extensively on Google for the most part. MSN and Yahoo each have a piece of the search engine pie and everyone else gets crumbs. I was very surprised to see how many small players are on this decidedly unlevel playing field. One particular search engine appeared up on my radar today. It is called StrategicBoard and it is based in Israel. It is focused on blogs and has a human editorial element that is designed to exclude spam. If any of you readers are attempting to operate Google-free for ethical and/or spiteful reasons, you should check it out.

I was tipped off to when it was relatively new and I jumped at it because it appeared to have some good potential as far as connecting with other bloggers and gaining readership. My experience with the site was disappointing and I would have forgotten about it if I wasn’t on the mailing list.

It may be that sustained effort or a more eye-catching avatar would have resulted in some real benefit from this website. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who disagrees with my opinion that this site isn’t of much help to individual bloggers.