Uh-oh! Somebody’s Actually Reading This- Part 2

It’s been almost two months since I made the first post about my blog’s statistics. It seems more than a little bit self-centered to make another one, but I feel like I figured out some things since the last post, so I wanted to do a quick update. As you can see from the above chart the number of views on my blog have increased by almost 3,000 in the last month.

The first thing I can say with more confidence, now that I’ve been able to study it, is the only reason I have even that number of views is…I’ll give you a hint, almost no one views my blog because of my great wit, large vocabulary, and propensity towards extrapolating deeper meanings and life-lessons from science fiction and comicbooks. Instead, I’ve only got these views because I like to use large pictures.

“What if Spiderman had Rescued Gwen Stacy” and “Childhood’s End” were my top articles at the time I wrote my last post. Since then every time I’ve seen them get hits it’s been though searches on Google images.

What I also discovered is that the Google search engine is more likely to put your image higher on results screen if you have an article title that includes keywords, and have your pictures saved with keywords too, rather then just using something like image_ 1 or whatever code your camera automatically generates.

I tested this theory on a couple of my old articles that hadn’t gotten a lot of views. It turned out to be the perfect month to tweak my old Thor Review what with the new movie out in theaters. According to my Photobucket account, which also has some statistical records, since I renamed the Thor photos in my article and made them more searchable I got 323 views in a month.

The second thing I figured out is that one of the easiest ways to get views is to be a leech. I wrote an article “Meeting the Angry Video Game Nerd.” I wrote it just to get it off my chest, I felt like there was a certain bit of universality in the fact that I felt a connection to a celebrity, but meeting him brought the illusion of that fantasy into harsh clarity. My father used to call this the Johnny Carson effect because Carson said one time that people would come up to him on the street and start talking to him about their sick aunt or that Jimmy just graduated from middle school. They felt so at home with him due to seeing him every night on TV that then deluded themselves into thinking it was a two-way connection. Anyway, the article didn’t get a lot of views until the Nerd himself posted an article and a video montage about the game convention where I’d met him. I posted a simple reply on his website it just said, “I was at the convention too. I met the Nerd and I wrote an article about it. Here’s the link…” And from that I got 386 views on my article in one day!

Here’s a chart where you can clearly see that day where I had so many views. I have to admit I got sort of giddy over it at the time.


My third lesson was to pick popular subjects. The first article I did on the “Game of Thrones” series got some views so I got an idea for the ultimate “sell-out” article. I thought of it as selling out because it was the first time I wrote an article just to see if it would get views. I slapped on lots of pictures onto the article, plugged in some humorous text, and I had a best seller. “The Top 10 Game of Thrones Bad-Asses.” turned out to be the exactly the juggernaut I imagined. It has generated 1,572 views in one month. 474 of those are from image searches for Tyrion Lannister, obviously the fan favorite character.

Now I’m sure you’re thinking, "who cares? So some people are looking at pictures you posted what good does that do you?" To tell you the truth I’m not really sure. All I’ve been doing is experimenting and seeing how I could tweak things to maximize views and so far my experimenting is bearing fruit. Now that I figured out in about a month how to get people to look at my pictures, maybe in another month I can figure out how to get them to read my text?...Okay, it will probably take much longer than that.

Anyone got any advice?

Uh-oh! Somebody’s Actually Reading This.

First Problem

I have two problems, the first problem is that I just discovered Blogger.com has all sorts of statistical data about how many people view my blog, how they found the blog, what browser they were using, where they were from, etc.

I know everyone else that has a blog through this site probably realized this long ago, but I somehow missed it until now. This is a problem because I can be a bit obsessive sometimes so it’s not a good thing that I can go in at anytime and see if anyone is reading my blog and then press the little button that says refresh and see if anyone started reading it in those last two seconds.

I now know that I’ve had over 100 page views from such foreign countries as Germany, Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, and Netherlands and Spain. And in the last week I’ve had visitors from New Zealand, Denmark and the United Arab Emirates.

I can’t even get my best friends to look at my blog, but I have readers in Indonesia?!

It was also interesting to see the different web browsers and operating systems people are using to view my site because I’d never heard of many of the more obscure ones.

For instance people have viewed my site with the web browsers Ubuntu (a Linux browser), SeaMonkey, Novarra-Vision, and PBSTB (which is so obscure the only thing I found by searching Google for it, was a link to another blog where she asks “What is this browser?” and even though there are many replies no one seems quite sure).

My blog has been viewed by such devices as I-pads, I-phones, I-pods, Blackberry, DoCoMo another mobile phone operator, (but it didn’t say whether it was the Indian or Japanese DoCoMo) and Playstation Portable.

It just amuses me to no end that someone manages to get their Playstation Portable to browse the Internet and they end up at my blog of all places. Plus, it’s just a portable video game console, Game Boy sure as heck couldn’t surf the web.

My question is how come no one using an Android or Nook Color has been to my blog?

Second Problem

My second problem is that people are actually looking at my blog. This blog wasn’t created so that people could read it, it was started so that I had a place to put the various articles I’d post on message boards. I’d post them and then I’d want to find them months or week’s later and I’d have to struggle with that particular site’s search engine to find it. Also, as I got more layout savvy I got frustrated with message board limitations; I wanted it to look just so.

And so,"One Geek’s Mind" was born, a storehouse for all of my brain-droppings in one convenient location.

Up until now I was working in a vacuum. I only have five followers of my blog so I figure no ones looking except for my wife that faithfully reads it, but does admit to skipping over the boring parts (love you Babe!). But, according to the stats I’ve had over 8,000 page views.

My most read book review is “Childhood’s End” it's had 534 views since I posted it on Oct. 29, 2009. I just looked st the review tonight for the first time in who knows how long and I feel like I have to apologize to all 534 readers for never bothering to fix up the text. It was double-spaced and the heading weren’t bolded. Now I know why girls get so embarrassed when someone comes over to their house and it’s “all a mess.” I also have no idea why this particular review is so popular. It’s blowing everything else out of the water; the next most viewed book reviews are “Contact” (93 views) and “Fahrenheit 451” (89 views). Is it just that good a review? Is it a popular book?

At Jim Harris’ suggestion I sent one of my articles “How Many Hugo Nominees and Winners can you get for free?” to a popular Science Fiction blog, SF Signal. They linked to my blog and it was a successful experiment, I got 67 hits because of SF Signal’s link. The article is my fifth most popular overall receiving a total of 223 views so far. The rest of the hits are probably a result of people searching Google with phrases like “Hugo winners, free.”

My third most viewed article with 253 views is, “Some Details in Back to the Future.” It’s just a quick article I threw together after watching the movie again. Most of the things I mentioned are found in other various articles around the blog-o-sphere. It’s just the things I happened to pay attention to that viewing and decided to look further into.

The other five top-ten articles are all comicbook reviews. Comics were one of the original focuses of the blog, but they’ve kind of been eclipsed by some of my other interests lately. The last time I wrote one was last April.

The number one most viewed article is, “What if Spiderman had rescued Gwen Stacy?” (604 views). It’s a well written review for what it is, but my theory on it’s popularity is that since I used the title of the comic for the title of the article, my blog comes up first itf you search the title in Google. And since I used a big scan of the cover with a high resolution, it also comes up first in image searches for both the title and “What If 24” (that’s what I named the image file).

The other popular comic articles are "Daredevil Part 3, The Romita Era" (175 views) and "Not so Mellow Yellow- Daredevil the Early Years Part 1" (132 views), I have no clue why people are skipping Part 2. Daredevil is kind of the "red-headed step-child" of the comicbook world, it's weird to me that his articles would get more then my other Spiderman reviews or Thor or Ironman.

Then there are, "Musings on the Incredible Hulk Part 2" (131 views) and Part 3 (122 views). These figures really confused me because you’d think people would start with Part 1, which is my personal favorite of all the comicbook reviews I’ve ever done. In it I purport that the Hulk is a modern day Buddha attempting to reach a form of nirvana by finding an end to his suffering. I guess it was too out there for most people.