Monday 10 December 2007

The gift that keeps on giving.



The turn of the month is always an interesting time for bloggers. Most will have a look at their visitor statistics and the decent bloggers will publish theirs. Many will indicate who their top referrers are. Some of us at the amoebic end of the blogging spectrum will glance wistfully at 'Sitemeter' (or whichever service one uses) and find that a little humility goes a long way.

I tend to get about 20-30 visits a day. Which actually I’m quite pleased about. Many fellow members of Blogpower do drop by and occasionally are kind enough to leave a comment or two.

Occasionally I get a boost to the figures when a kind soul finds a little amusement in a post of mine and links to it. Steve Green (proprietor of the mighty Daily Referendum) was kind enough to add my recent post on American views on the Devil and Darwin to one of his ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ roundups. Nich Starling’s link to a treatment I did on Bluetongue still occasionally generates referrals. And any mention of a post on one of James Higham’s Blogfocus roundups causes a pleasant little statistical blip.

Many (although pleasingly a decreasing proportion) of visits are due to interweb searches. Lots of American students pass this way either as a result of obviously undertaking a study of Beowulf or hoping to see a CGI rendered Angelina Jolie.

‘And why not’.

But this set me thinking.

By way of an experiment, would it be possible to generate some additional recurrent traffic just by virtue of posting some phrases thrown together at random.

So for scientific purposes I will use the following. These are selected completely at random and any juxtaposition is almost totally accidental.

Gordon Brown, Lord of Rings, One Eye, British Government, Incompetent, Corrupt, Illegal Donations, Palace Coup, Tony Blair, God, Allah, Superstition, Sky Pixies, Teddy Bears, flowers, memorials, Princess Diana, Dodi Al Fayed, Car Crash, Conspiracy, Pregnant, utter bollocks, Tabloid Press, Overreaction, Sensationalism,
Madeleine McCann, Everton FC, Arsenal Football Club, Arsene Wenger, Thierry Henry, vanished without trace, Olympic Budgetary Controls, 2012, Super Prisons, ID Cards, failure to present, National Health Service, Tax payers, waste, civil service, bureaucracy, European Union, referendum, elections, David Cameron, hung parliament ‘Chris Clegg’ , Lib-Lab pact, Gordon Brown……..

Let’s see if that sets the visitor counter whirring.

If you can think of any worthy additions to the list please let me know and I will update!

6 comments:

jmb said...

Sitemeter definitely was invented to make us humble. I don't know why I am happy to get 100 plus visits a day since 80 of them are google searches.

That in itself is interesting however. My old Westie avatar used to bring half of my google searches but the new one does not make the grade I'm afraid.

One of my popular searches is for the Blue Man Group which I did a post on once, with another popular one for Rodin sculptures when I posted about the Rodin museum in Philadelphia.

Good luck with your scientific experiment. A very comprehensive list which should make all the difference.

Colin Campbell said...

It is all very mystifying where that traffic comes from. You just have to stick with it and write what you like to write about and visitors will follow. Combine that with some luck with linking and going and visiting, which I see that you do. You should be able to track the success of your experiment. It will be interesting to see what your outcome is.

Wolfie said...

I found my traffic went ballistic when I added a post which included the popular search term "killer chicken" and almost as high with the term "Sarah Jessica Parker is ugly".

Makes you wonder what people are doing with google all day.

Julie said...

Your phrases are like the ones that bring visitors to my blog every day:

organ transplant cross stitch

being one of the latest.

AloneMan said...

Carol Smilie.
She;s a worthwhile addition to pretty much everything.

sally in norfolk said...

Should of added sallyinnorfolk to your list..... traffic to your site would have doubled...:-)