This entry was posted on
Saturday, December 14th, 2002 at
12:01 am and is filed
under Uncategorized.
Ever since I arrived in this country, I have longed to drive your beautiful cars and make love to your expensive women.
No, wait… let me start again.
Ever since I arrived in this country, I’ve been neck-deep in the internet. This past year has been the best by far, both professionally and personally, and I owe it mostly to the publishing format known as weblogging.
While I’ve participated in some very large sites and run a few small sites of my own in the past, most of what I really had to say was broadcast into usenet and various web, chat and email communities. It’s a format you may be familiar with – quietly defining myself a paragraph at a time, sharing a few links, having a few laughs, and maybe even beating my chest when necessary.
It wasn’t until I started broadcasting on a central web-hosted channel that I could really bring this together with what I knew about search engine optimisation. The weblog format also allowed me to attract and hold an audience that appreciates the way I think (at the speed I think). In short, I could not only bring new people into an audience via established ideas, but also expose new ideas to an established audience. This advance in knowledge and ability is a significant highlight in my rise to the lofty heights of benevolent dictator.
So, enough about me, let’s crunch a few numbers and then talk about you for a bit.
In the past 365 days, I’ve made a total of 2,374 posts (not including this one). I’m kind of lazy about weekends, so we can pretty safely say that this indicates an average of 8-9 posts a day. Looking at the file sizes now, this amounts to 1.61MB of raw .TXT data. That’s a lot of typing. Probably a few spilling mistakes, too. Actually, I think I may be developing Advanced Computer-Induced Dyslexia. This seems to arise from a general reliance on spell-checkers and auto-complete functions, combined with constant interruptions to data entry by pop-up browser windows.
Moving swiftly back to the point, 762 photoshopped images were produced purely for my – and your – amusement. Again, taking the disgraceful wasteland of weekends into account, this gives us an average of 3 images a day. Most of these were broadcast into the messageboards at Fark or B3ta, but only about 1 in 5 turned up here. At least 2 new readers find us every day by searching for ‘bloggerheads’ or ‘bloggerheads.com’ after seeing one of these images. About a dozen or so are smart enough to simply type the URL.
Boy, bean counting is fun isn’t it? You’d best settle in, we’re about to tackle some big numbers…
As a result of general blogging and the dozen or so campaigns we ran over the last year, Bloggerheads attracted 101,302 unique visitors to the core weblog. (This does not include traffic numbers from the campaigns themselves, just visitors to the main weblog. The M*A*S*H Quiz alone has attracted over 45,000 visitors.)
89,837 weblog readers returned for more, and from here is gets a bit vague, but clearly and visibly whittles down… Roughly 1,000 turned into regular visitors, but only about 90 – the core faithful – visit every single day (usually at 9:30 or over lunch).
Erm, and I hear from about dozen of you. Sometimes.
You certainly are a quiet lot, but this is to be expected. Almost every weblog or online community has a large, hidden audience (even sites that run an anonymous comments feature).
You lovable lurkers, you. I give so much, but I hear so little. It breaks my heart. Tell you what, one-off deal, just between you and me, not a word to the tax-man; the first 3 long-time lurkers to get in touch by email after this post will receive by snail mail an autographed copy of my now-remaindered (and therefore highly collectible) book on marketing. I’ll even sign it with the swearword of your choice or draw a rude picture if you like.
Yep, gotcha. The point…
The production and ongoing broadcast of images, ideas, games, campaigns and the weblog content overall generated a total of 2,466 inbound links. Google can’t see them all, but it knows about a heck of a lot more than it lets on. It’s kind of like dark matter. You can’t see it via a PageRank or even a manual search, but I know from the way Bloggerheads behaves that it is there and it is working for me.
So, what have I done with my abilities in the dark art of search engine optimisation and the added power of weblogging?
Well, I’ve (hopefully) entertained and/or motivated over a quarter of a million people in one way or another. Along the way I’ve developed a system that will let any suitable organisation plug into positive customer behaviour and use that to attract new customers via search engines.
Starting out with some asshat who stole my Tags and Titles, I also found the time to administer some vital and highly visible clue-by-fours to a number of worthy individuals and/or organisations. The most popular campaign of this type was the thing we ran over spammer Ronald Scelson. (I like the way I worded that. It makes it sound like we mowed him down with a robust form of vehicular transport. Anyway, this was the most-visited page of the year.)
Together we also located Mustard Man, but in the end failed to find him a date. Despite the fact that for 6 clear weeks he was the top search result for ‘find a man’ in Google.
What tickles me most, however, is that I actually managed to get a parliamentary question tabled – and an answer from Tony Blair.
Oh, and I started my own religion. No biggie.
Still no email address for Tony, though – and that spammer is still spamming. I made the shortlist for Best British Blog, but didn’t pull ahead to break the tape. I also didn’t quite manage to make the front page of a broadsheet, finish my first novel, write a top ten single or successfully engage my universal micropayment solution.
Next year, folks. Next year.
