Google Analytics, for those of you who don’t know, is Google’s newest attempt at world domination new web statistics tool. It’s currently in beta and is invite-only. I’ve been using Shortstat to keep basic tabs on traffic to my site, but when I finally got an invite to join Google Analytics, I thought I’d give it a try.
The truth is, Google has done a bang-up job. Their tool does all sorts of cool stuff, like provide a handy geographic map of where your visitors are coming from, not just on the web, but in the real world. It gives all sorts of cool conversion reports that show how effective your ads are and how effectively search engines draw people to your site and other goodness like that. That’s cool. If I were a small business, I would devour that kind of stuff.
Unfortunately, the truth is also that my site is not that popular. Abysmally so. By de-obfuscating my site statistics, Google has made clear the following unfortunate facts:
- Most of my visitors come to my site via search engines, but don’t stay.
- My photos drive a fair bit of traffic, mostly through Google image search. To be fair, those people are getting what they want out of my site. Also to be fair, they don’t give a damn about what I actually write.
- “anything but clothes party” is a very pressing topic in the world today. I, however, don’t have nearly enough to say about it.
- The most popular tag for viewing my photos is “beer.” (this, I must admit, is a point of pride).
This is all well and good, but my aspirations of grandeur are greatly deflated by these findings. Also, let’s be honest, it’s hard to justify putting lots of time into a site that no one cares to see. So I’ve decided it’s time for a new marketing campaign. My last marketing effort, which consisted of putting my blog on Planet Carleton, has been a moderate success.
The million dollar question is: how do you get anyone to care about your personal blog and/or your personal life? When it comes to self-promotion, how shameless is too shameless? Is whoring oneself out by posting to famous people’s blogs morally bankrupt? (I thought about commenting on Thomas’ Dolby’s blog the other day just to try to lure him into visiting mine). In short, what do people who actually try to bring in traffic do?
Perhaps posting more than once a week is a start.
Posted on April 14th, 2006 by Lee
Filed under: Uncategorized
Do you ping sites such as Technorati or Weblogs.com? Technorati tags can help too. I once blogged about a sex tape that was circulating the web and for about a week I was getting thousands of hits per day. It was pretty shameless though.
I found your blog via the Planet Carleton site, in case you’re interested.
I found this through Planet Carleton, as well.
A new area of the Carleton website I just found. Rather intriguing of, too. Seems like there aren’t any officially sanctioned student blogs, but just a whole load of Carleton-associated blogs. (I see the LJ there! Woohoo, go LJ.)
Anyway, thought your post sounded a little contemplative so decided to drop a random note in…
I definitely ping weblogs and Technorati, but they’ve never driven much traffic in my experience. Planet Carleton is great; I actually was in the process of developing a similar site on behalf of John Schott when I found out that ITS was already on top of it.
I’ve been contemplating the Technorati tags, the main obstacles seem to be finding a good plugin and going through and tagging all my old posts. Billy, what plugin do you use, and how do you like it?
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