land-a-linkin'

Blog visits are up. The dead ones that I track were down, which to me means the bots might be down. Only a bot. would visit a blog that hasn't been updated for years, and when you think about it, the only reason you'd visit that blog would be to scoop up random language, not find anything new. But the ones I actively update, 9 commercial and 29 personal, mostly up. Now there's a fine line there, some of those I've been neglacting, and are as good as dead. Some of the personal lean toward commercial and some of the commercial are more porsonal (divided by which profile they're on). They are all connected to each other. I'm not sure if people come into the system and then use the various tools - squares, lighthouse tour, links, to wander around and see what I've got. I'm pretty sure they don't spur a whole lot of book sales but they do spur visits and out of visits comes sales eventually.

22 of the 29 now get more than a thousand hits a month, which is one more reason to develop them better. It could be that these are bots too, but slicker, who knows what's bots. But a thousand is a lot. A couple of them have over ten thousand.

I do no other advertising. I do read marketing, and this. But these are at least entirely my own. Some represent certain clear ideas that I want to put out into the world. In some cases that dooms them I suppose.

Ah well back to the drawing board.

Blog visits are up. Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's the bots, traveling around by the thousands, gobbling up everything I write and selling it to the AI. You can have it I suppose. I never gave you my permission to steal it but I DID put it right out here where anyone can find it.

Most dramatically up, yeah write, where I complain bitterly about the travails of being a writer and self-marketing. I have plenty of complaints but have not really done much to fix the blog up or make it presentable. It went over 100,000 total visits (3rd on my list for overall visits) while it's had over 10,000 two months in a row. What's up with that? I'm not sure a writer's complaints could be such hot reading material. In cases like this I suspect the blogger carousel, and in this case maybe they put it up there twice or put it up there and then forgot it was there. How do I know? In any case it's raking them in. I'm not turning them ito book sales yet, maybe that's coming.

So, 29 personal blogs, 9 commercial, all but about six have rising averages. 21 of the top 22, and four of the nine commercial, all over a thousand hits a month.Bots you say? Could be. Just like a bot to come back, over and over again, and not even tell you why, not to mention tell you where the heck they came from. I thought Google was making the pages of links more hidden (where the average bloke finds us, in a page of search engine returns), but if we lost from that, we gained from the bots' relentless pursuit of truth.

The dead blogs ironically were down a little. I use them actually to see how many bots float around even scraping up dead blog carrion, hasn't been renewed in maybe twenty years in some cases. Yes, they still get some hits. Maybe that's the baseline. If you get thirty or forty even when you're dead that doesn't say much for the standards of your visitors then, does it?

Life goes on, as my one and only CD says. I have a few blogs to fix up, if thousands are going to show up every month. And it looks like they are.

Several blogs that I pour my heart into are doing extremely well. One is Quaker and the other two are writing blogs. I don't post often, or assertively, I just say what I really feel or in the case of one, a novel idea, put things that are kind of in the shape of a story. has something going for it and it has been doing well for a while, though in my mind that's where I go to complain about writing so it could tilt toward the negative...but maybe that's what people want to read. The Quaker one, quakers rock, has a number of plays on it so it could be that some troupe is just using it, going back and forth constantly, racking up the views, just to learn some play. But it got 6700 views this month and that's quite a few.

my main blog got over 10,000; several were in the thousands all the way down the list, including the commercial ones, which are newer, smaller, just getting off the ground. Yet it was not overall an all-good month; not all averages or views went up; not everyone is spending the summer surfing web sites. Of course there is the possibility that one or more are on the Blogger carousel, which gives you a one-or-two month explosion but is mostly random views. I'd like to think that 1000 views translates into one click, and 100 clicks translates into a sale. So I have a few more views to haul in before I see any noticeable effect.

But what are the numbers saying - put clickable things on the websites, especially the writing ones; make visiting them an experience. Welcome to my territory. I am tired of getting banned from Twitter for some unknown reason, so I'm not talking to Elon anyway, and this is where you'll find me.

# posted by tom @ 6:52 AM 0 comments

Steamy out; everyone's getting ready for the Fourth and fireworks have been going off in town all week. The dogs are getting jumpy. I'm in here counting blog visit numbers to stay out of the heat. It's the coming and going, from air-con and back, that gets to me by the end of the day. The blog numbers are oddly reassuring.

29 personal blogs and 9 commercial, on two different servers, plus about seven dead ones that I keep track of partly because I'm mulling over what to do with them. One is called "turning point" but it's about the 1970 bombing of Sterling Hall in Madison Wisconsin; I think people land on it just because "Turning Point" is in the news. Last month 761 people landed on it. I haven't posted on it for maybe ten years, but maybe it comes up high in Google searches if only because of its name, and its consistency, and the fact that it does have some essence to it. Perhaps the bots are thinking, why is this blog here? Maybe it's what they are searching for?

The bots are always trolling around, but there's no way of knowing how many actual visits are actually visits. All the seven dead ones, for example, have rising averages. So there's more bots than there used to be? No way of knowing. Overall they were mixed. Commercial ones did well too and also the lower third of the personal ones, the loser ones, and that seems to say bots to me. One that's about writing (yeah write, here, seems to be doing incredibly well, though now when I go looking for it, I can't find it because links to it are faulty. It's a little edgy. But it's about my life and feelings as a writer trying to peddle my wares out on the market.

It's actually a grim existence. Both the blogs and my writing are basically here for me; that's why they survive. Because day in and day out, I need to express myself in this world, and also because I have no patience anymore for pointless blather. I was in academia for a while and had a lifetime of it there alone. But now if I have something to say I want someplace to put it, and it works for me to put it in public but where very few people actually see it. Then I wake up one day tired of advertising my work on Facebook or Twitter, which is basically dropping pop-art around, and realize that if I'm getting 761 visitors a month even on a dead one, I'm wasting a lot of views to not set these blogs up a little nicer so they point to my work. Now that has been a slow and gradual process, but at least nobody kicks me out of there, or bans me like Twitter did for some god-forsaken reason. Well Elon you can kiss that whatever because I have my own place to advertise, and I don't care if the wrong people come to visit.

Blog visits are up, though I haven't counted total visits yet (I will). The main commercial one, blatant self promotion, went from 1282 in March to 4661 in April to 7467 in May (just measured); that is what I call skyrocketing. Where do they come from? Some on that site come from Amazon but I might look into it; I'm actually not sure.

I've been worried about the change in Google, which supposedly would rather give you an AI analysis of your search terms now, instead of giving you pages and pages of possible sites, which of course is where we get most of our visitors. But several things are unclear to me about their changes, which are supposedly very unpopular. First, for a while they've been doing this, burying the lists of sites under the AI synopsis of what you're looking for, and our blog visits are still up. Second, though this change allegedly happened already, I still can find the lists of sites by scrolling down like I always did, and so am not sure if they are really going to eliminate the lists of sites altogether as I'd read. And finally, does this change lead to users like me switching over to another engine, like DuckDuckGo? In my case, not yet, but I'd certainly consider it. Google would be stupid to lose all those customers over eliminating a good thing that was the source of all their success - so final question - is this for real? Long ago I listed Google as one of the three best things about the internet - Google, Blogger, and Boggle - and I meant it, and I liked how there's a certain symmetry in their names. It's kind of like our license plates, now we have FX and EE.

So, this month, 33 averages up, 4 averages down, 1 unchanged; among the dead ones, all 7 up. I measure the dead ones partly just to decide, is all this traffic just bot traffic, no relation to whether anyone is actually using the sites? But I measure dead ones partly because I'm trying to decide whether to delete them or to revive them and sometimes they can go either way. One called Turning Point, and it's about the play by the same name, and the bombing of the University of Wisconsin Madison math building in 1970, no relation at all to Charlie Kirk, but of course it got 435 hits in May and has a running average of 208, pretty good, for not having posted on it for what, about fifteen years. I could go in there, stick some pop art on there, advertise the book that play is in, and get something out of it, but I don't. I have enough trouble maintaining sites like blatant self promotion.

Visitors are up, and I mean that in both ways. First way is when I write the number of April visitors and make a quick, casual glance back at March and Feb, and see that they are rising either gradually or dramatically, or as in the old days, unpredictably. Second is when I compute the average, FEB-MAR-APR, and compare it to last month's average, JAN-FEB-MAR, and when more of those have gone up that's a good month. In the second case you can see that it's literally a comparison of JAN and APR, and if you use the blog-traffic-driven-by-shopping theory, of course JAN is low, and APR is driven by tax returns.

But a couple of things to say about the system, which is 29 personal, 9 commercial, and 9 dead ones that I track just to. get a sense of web traffic in general. Because traffic has been rising steadily, I now have eleven blogs with over a thousand visitors a month (average) and more and more I'm seeing, what's the point of going out on the FB sites when I have people smacking their eyes up against some good blogs here. These blogs have been around a while, they get good visibility on google searches, they have catchy names, people click on them. There is a very slight correspondents with sales. I would say, a thousand visitors = 1 click, 100 clicks = 1 sale. It'll take forever but at least it works, kind of like read marketing. Something will come of it.

Then, the campaign to upgrade templates, put more pop on there, etc., is endangered. I have to stay vigilant. I started in on Quakers and if I can finish that I'll be overjoyed. Been hoping on redecorating ESL sites for some time.

But I did get on twelve of them, and have a good month.

Blog visits seem to be up. I report two things here: first, how recording of the month (Mar.) number seems compared to what I see (Jan/Feb), and how that feels; second, the average (JAN/FEB/MAR) compared to last month's average (DEC/JAN/FEB) and whether that average is higher or lower. You can see abstractly that that second calculation is a literal comparison of March vs. December but nevertheless it helps me track whether they are moving up or down, in a general kind of way. In this case those comparisons are more mixed. My "up" is based on how March numbers felt.

One thing I'll say, though: there are a lot of visitors in there, in my. 29 personal blogs and 9 commercial ones, and even a few dead ones that I track. Why track dead ones, you might ask. Because I might bring them back to life, as I did for one of them this month. Also because I want to know what happens if you do nothing but sit there month after month.

The one I brought back to life is called Millenium Readers. It's about how people don't read anymore. I have a lot to say, so I'll use it as a soapbox.

If I get the chance I'll add up all blog visitors for the month and start comparing one month to the next.

If I get the chance I'll keep cleaning up the templates, updating the links in them, advertising my own books in them.

Above all they are useful to me just in reviewing what's happening in the world, in my family, among my books, etc. I am about to publish a new book. Time to spread the joy!