Nope, I’m not talking about cars on the road. I’m talking about website hits.
While I’ve got a blog, and I’m handy with a computer, I’m not really internet-savvy, and the more detailed aspects of computers and the world wide web elude me. It’s not that I’m stupid exactly, I’ve just never applied myself to learning any more than needed to use the applications that I need.
Before I started blogging last year I had never heard of pings, pingbacks, trackbacks and the like. Once I started my blog I read a few definitions and looked on some forums (or fora for the pedants in the group) to learn about these terms. I understood them to a degree, realized I didn’t need to know about them in detail, and promptly ended my research.
What I understand (and my understanding may be flawed) is that with pingbacks you can see when another website creates a link (like a bridge) from their site to your site.
I create these links often — many times each week usually – when I find something interesting on the web that I want to share. Because I allow pingbacks and trackbacks, the person on the other end of the link (bridge) can see that it exists, and can follow it back to my site to see who I am and why I have created the link.
Recently I created such a link to the Bangkok Eyes site, and many of my readers followed it. William R. Morledge (who runs the BE site) could see traffic coming from my site, and followed the link (bridge) back to my site to see who I was. He left a comment acknowledging and thanking me for the link, and he immediately created a link from his site to mine in return.
In the same way, when friscodude wrote a negative blog about my site recently, he included a link so his readers could come look for themselves at what I had written. Basically from what I could see, these days, most of his site involves writing a one-paragraph intro to a blog from someone else and creating a link. He doesn’t seem to write too much himself anymore. Anyway, when I saw readers arriving at my site from his I went to see what he had written, and why he linked to my site.
Today’s I posted another blog with a link to a new blog site, the farang.com.
The point is, as a blogger, you can generally see where your traffic is coming from, and if you like, you can track back to find out why those links were put into place.
Likewise, when someone arrives via a search engine such as GOOGLE or YAHOO, I can see that they arrived via that link, and the words they entered in the search string to bring up my site.
Okay. Why am I telling you this, and why should you care?
On the second point — why should you care — I have no answer. Maybe you don’t, though I was fairly impressed to see all the free bells & whistles that are behind a blog.
But on the first point — why am I telling you this — the reason is that on Friday I had a sharp spike in traffic to my site.
But in my statistics page there are no increased hits from new visible links or pingbacks (or new bridges for those who like to have a physical metaphor).
My typical traffic in February has been running at 1200 to 1700 hits per day. My best day ever (before yesterday) had been 27 December 2007 when my site had a little over 2,300 hits in a single day. (There are blogs in the world that do 10 hits a day and others that do 100,000 so my numbers, while decent, are far from impressive).
Friday the number of hits jumped to 3,698 for no apparent reason, and on Saturday (traditionally my slowest day for hits) it totalled over 3,000 again.
Additionally, almost all the increased traffic went to 8 specific pages in my blog, and two of those pages were from November last year — pages that rarely get a look from anyone these days. Also there was a significant amount of traffic on a page that can only be reached by one of two ways (a) if you know the URL already, or (b) by following a single obscure link inside of one of my old blogs.
S0, I started looking closer at what happened. I realized that the hits from search engines had increased dramatically, and when I looked to see what words were being entered into the search engines these were the top returns:
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Yesterday Search Views shaved 164 shaved beaver 32 sex positions 30 naked 27 beaver 24 busty asian 22 thai girl 15 naked girls 9 werewolf’s lair 9 small girls 9 |
My ‘hidden’ photograph which can be reached only via a link tucked in the middle of a blog about the Magic Table — a photo that I put in as a subtle joke for those who spotted and clicked on the link — is titled “shaved beaver”.
Something must have happened recently to make it appear very high in a search engine. For example, I entered the word ’shaved’ in Google Images, and found that this photo on my site appeared in the 14th position. When I entered ’shaved beaver’ it came up in the number 1 position.
So, what’s happening is that people around the world (but mostly in America from what the statistics tell me) are looking for photos of bald taco, and because of this photo’s prominent position in search engines, they are ending up in my site.
Once they arrive and see the photo, presumeably they want more, so they are heading to my photo gallery. I have only a limited number of nude photos, but they are looking until they find them, then opening those links to look at them.
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Top Posts & Pages These posts on your blog got the most traffic. YesterdayTitle Views Photo Gallery 1 275 Photo Gallery 2 223 Photo Gallery 3 170 Photo Gallery 148 Where’s the sex? 139 |
The other post that’s getting a lot of hits is called “Where’s the sex?” That one is one of the most boring blogs I have ever written. I’m guessing that these guys arrive on my site to see Britney’s hairless hatch, then type “sex” in my search engine. They see a blog titled “Where’s the sex?” and go to read it. They will certainly come away disappointed since it has nothing to do with sex and nothing interesting to say.
Consistently since I started the blog until Thursday, my statistics showed that on any given day between 45 and 60% of the people who wandered into my site (usually via a search engine) realized quickly that this wasn’t what they were looking for and left immediately. On any given day, about 10% of visitors spent an hour or more looking at the site. A small percentage (about 5%) spent between 30 seconds and 5 minutes, and the balance (25 to 40%) spent between 5 minutes and an hour.
So, typically, most visitors either left immediately, or they stayed a while and explored.
On Friday and Saturday the statistics changed dramatically. The number of immediate exits fell from about half to only about a third of vistors. People spending an hour or more fell to ony 3%. The biggest category was the 30 seconds to 5 minutes visit — traditionally my smallest.
So, because of this one picture of Britney’s Bald Beaver, I’m getting thousands of new visitors a day, but it seems that they are only interested in naked pictures and sex stories. It seems that none of them (or extremely few) have any interest in reading about Thailand.
This comment, posted today, seems to be the mindset of my new crew of visitors:
Cool blog, very informative. I wish you had more photos of the girls.
So I’m not sure what to do. I think the best thing would be to delete the photo, since it doesn’t really match the site, and it’s generating large volumes of the wrong kind of traffic.
But I thought I’d ask for your opinion before I do that. After all, there are many creative ways to deal with problems.
Do you think that deleting the photo is the best idea or do you have another, better suggestion?
For example, maybe I should find someone who has a bald-taco website and offer to redirect all my traffic to them. Or maybe I should change the link to a serious looking warning that states that the person reading the page has been identified by an FBI program as a potential sex offender, and that his IPS address has been noted and he will be investigated in due course.
I don’t know. If you’ve got a good idea about what I should do, feel free to leave a comment below or email me at werewolfs_lair@yahoo.com.
February 17, 2008 at 7:35 pm |
Replace it with a pic of shaved Thai beaver. I don’t care for Brittany’s snatch.
February 17, 2008 at 8:37 pm |
Replace the picture with a photo of Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej.
Which analyze tool do you use for looking, where your traffic is coming from?
February 17, 2008 at 9:29 pm |
There is no such thing as “wrong traffic” in the blogging world. ANY traffic is good traffic, no? Even if the result is one or two more returning readers. Keep the pic.
February 17, 2008 at 9:38 pm |
politicsx: I use statcounter. there is a logo at the bottom of every blog. I believe that clicking on that logo will take you to their home page. I didn’t do any research to choose the best stat company when i started using them. this is a hobby for me, not a business, so i just use what’s easiest for me. stat counter was simple to implement.
i get only a limited stat feed because wordpress doesn’t allow javascript in their free-host sites. I could solve that by moving to a different server, but that would involve spending money to host the blog, which I don’t want to do.
February 17, 2008 at 11:08 pm |
“fora”. thank you.
February 18, 2008 at 9:55 am |
Write a blog about ladyboys and watch your traffic soar……
February 18, 2008 at 1:59 pm |
MSB: When I have time, I often write three or four blogs at once, and then queue them up to post automatically at specified times. You’ll see that my posts are often timed for one minute past midnight or exactly 4 pm or 6 pm.
Yesterday I had some time on my hands and wrote 5 blogs. One of them was the one you’ve just commented on “Traffic” but another was about ladyboys. It’s next in the queue, and will post about 10 hours from now.
It’s not the standard ladyboy piece; it’ll be interesting to see the response to it. I also submitted it to the Big Mango website, but they haven’t replied so I don’t know if they’ll be using it, but they seem to be on a bit of a ladyboy theme at the moment.
Honestly, the last thing I want is to moderate a blog discussion about ladyboys.
February 18, 2008 at 6:16 pm |
I guess it is all about your motivation for blogging. What is your objective? to have the most people possible reading your blog? To have the most like-minded people reading your blog? Just to document your daily life?
I am guessing it isn’t just about getting as much traffic as possible but it is pretty tough for YOU to choose who is reading the blog and who isnt. If you tell us what traffic you want you may get some useful suggestions
February 18, 2008 at 9:40 pm |
newshound: I write mainly just because I enjoy writing and in Bangkok I have the time.
One thing about living here is that it’s easy to get bored. The sports I grew up with (NFL Football, baseball, basketball) aren’t played here, and ’sports bar’ here is almost code for 24 hour soccer channels. TV is filled with (mostly low quality) Thai language shows. The social life is a bit skewed… I’m certainly not going to dinner parties and gallery openings.
I find that the internet is what takes the place of a lot of what is missing. Lousy newspapers? No problem, get news online. Crap TV? download English language movies. No stimulating conversation? Read (or write) a blog or website.
I have no real aim with the blog, except to share what I’m thinking and going through. My imagined reader lives overseas, is an occasional visitor to Bangkok, and thinks he’d like to live here, but he’s never made the decision to do so.
My actual readers are probably different.
Perhaps JB is right, and I simply shouldn’t worry about who is coming to the site. It’s not anything I can control.
I have been surprised by some of the emails I have received from readers. I got one recently from a Thai who lives in Bangkok; I was surprised to find that Thai people read my blog. I got one from a lady in Australia, and I was surprised to find a woman reading my site.
Initially I was surprised that about 1/3 of my traffic comes from INSIDE Thailand. I simply don’t think that what I write would be interesting to Thailand residents, since my stuff is really targeted to people who have a limited knowledge of Bangkok. I have now become used to the idea that my blog has an appeal to a certain number of expats here, though I can never quite figure out why.
When I started writing, I felt as if 100 readers a month would be very nice. Until last week I was getting about 150 individual people a day (which was very satisfying for me), with about 1500 page hits. In other words, the AVERAGE visitor was clicking on 10 pages in a visit. This number sounds odd, and it took me a while to realize what caused it. Readers will typically click on between 1 and 4 pages, but a lot of the new visitors are drawn to the photo galleries, and they often click on thirty or fifty pictures, driving up the number of page hits.
I’ve always figured people interested in pictures of Thai girls were likely to be interested in the rest of the site, so I’ve always tried to make pictures a part of the site, and to continually update the galleries.
The reason I saw the Britney photo as a problem was that it seems to be attracting people who aren’t really interested in Thailand specifically, and I guess that seemed counter-productive for them and me.
In the end, though, it’s no extra work for me, and none of those visitors is complaining, so I guess it’s a non issue. I do this as a hobby, not a business, so the statistics are meaningless, execpt insofar as I like to see what people read and what they don’t.
One other reason for writing the blog is to practice storytelling. Like so many people on the internet these days, I’ve always wanted to write books or stories. Like many people, I have a half-finished novel sitting around waiting for an ending.
Writers have styles, and mine has been developed in the world of business. My writing has tended to be direct, linear and highly structured. I’ve been using the blog for the past year to practice styles that are more interesting.
I believe that I’m discovering that I have a certain facility with narrative writing that I can use in a longer (book) format. I’m starting to develop the ability to move forward and backward in time without totally losing the reader (though I had a disasterous blog about three months ago where the comments indicated that no one could understand the time line. We learn from our failures too).
In the end, I think I have a few goals in writing the blog:
1. I mainly write it for myself; a diary of my life. I write it for the same reason that people have kept diaries for centuries — whatever that reason is.
2. I hope that people now who want to understand the daily life of an expat in Bangkok will find it a useful resource. I try to offer a close up microscopic view of one life, covering work and play, and all the things that surround both.
3. I want to improve as a writer. I want to understand better how to develop an idea into a story. I want to understand how to be interesting, and to evoke responses in readers.
4. I want to have a hobby. This is more fun for me than any other hobby I can think of.
February 18, 2008 at 10:43 pm |
“I have now become used to the idea that my blog has an appeal to a certain number of expats here, though I can never quite figure out why.”
@Werewolf – As an expat, I like to read about the adventures of other expats living in Bangkok. Why, you ask? We can relate to you on a number of things that other folks living in the “real world” cannot. The issues we run into, the places we party at, the girls we hook up with, the scams and ripoffs, and the stories we share.
If I told someone back in the US that I kicked a cute girl out in the morning, went out on a date during the day with a different cute girl, had a hot & sweaty 3some later that afternoon, went bar hopping and clubbing and hooked up with some random hottie for the night…NOBODY would believe me. It’s just another normal day in the life of a Bangkok expat.
Also, since BKK is such a big and crowded city we tend to fall into a comfort zone of familiar places. I read your blog and others to find out about new places since there’s no way I can discover them all on my own!
February 19, 2008 at 10:17 am |
Despite my occasional snide remarks and continual amazement that you can live without a maid, I thoroughly enjoy your blog and do hope you can continue it.
Like anon, I am too an expat living in Bangkok and enjoy to read about other expat’s adventures especially in the nightlife scene that I have almost given up on. Going to bed at 10ish and getting up at 6am means I have never been to an after hours club nor sat out on Sukhumvit road talking to hookers until dawn. I thus rely on blogs like this, the mango boys and in the past the bad boy blog for updates on the local goings on. As a stock broker my foreign clients expect me to know about such things!