Fifty Shades of Grey: Super Bowl Follow-up

On October 4, 2012, I wrote a post entitled Blog Traffic OR Fifty Shades of Grey. I posted it on the night of the first presidential debate between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney. I chose to do the follow-up now because the final NFL playoff games were just completed and we now know that the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers will be competing against each other in Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans.

Not that this post has anything to do with football or politics. I only mention it because the Blog Traffic OR Fifty Shades of Grey post was an experiment to see how much traffic I could drive to my site by using keywords. Especially words surrounding current events. If you don't remember or didn't see the original post, I suggest you go back and take a look at it to see what this is all about.

In that post, I mentioned the presidential candidates several times and even linked to their websites. I made lists of current events in the news that week and threw around the names of celebrities, brands, and popular television shows just to see what would happen. My post about 9/11 pulled in some big numbers a year after I wrote it. My post about the falling of the UARS satellite pulled huge traffic due to its relevancy to the moment. This would be the first time I had done this intentionally.

I wanted to let some time pass to see what happened with the numbers and I think I may be on to something.

Blog Traffic OR Fifty Shades of Grey

Total hits: 575     

I know this is not a huge number, but my average number of hits for any post is about 120.

All Time Rank: #7
The post you are reading now is my 227^th post. My Blog Traffic OR Fifty Shades of Grey post was not that great, but it rose to near the top anyway.

Rank for the past 30 days: #1
This post was written over 3 months ago and is still getting more visits than any other post on my entire blog. I have 78 posts that have gone up since then and it still ranks #1 for the past month.

Rank for the past 7 days: #2
It was written over three months ago!

Rank for last 24 hours: #8
Despite its age and the number of posts to go up since then, it ranked in the top 10 today!

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While I did try to drop some jokes in on that post, it is far from being one of my better ones. The only thing it really had going for it was the name dropping I included in almost every paragraph. However, I do want to make sure that this is not just a fluke. I need to test the theory one more time.

This time I actually checked out the hot trends on Google's search engine to see what people are searching for. I want to go right to the source and get the real traffic this time instead of just throwing out a wide net and hoping to get lucky.

The most searched for term right now is (surprise, surprise) SUPERBOWL 2013! We probably could have guessed that one. Just for good measure, let's throw in a couple more terms to sweeten the searches a bit. Only a few hours ago, the Baltimore Ravens defeated the New England Patriots and the San Francisco 49ers beat the Atlanta Falcons. They will be playing in New Orleans on February 3, 2013 for Super Bowl XLVII. Is that enough terms for you?

Other highly searched NFL related terms: Ray Lewis, Earl Weaver, Chip Kelly, Colin Kaepernick, Marc Trestman (I have no idea who these people are.)

Jennifer Lawrence, star of Silver Linings Playbook, will be hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend. The musical guest will be the Lumineers. I don't know who they are either.

Lance Armstrong had a ball on Oprah this week, but got a little teste when he finally admitted to years of steroid use. This guy  admitted to using performance enhancing drugs after he had sued people for accusing him of using performance enhancing drugs. I've got to hand it to you, Lance. That took some ball.

Manti Te'o of Notre Dame has been all over the news this week as he mourns the death of his internet girlfriend that he never met, Lennay Kekua. Apparently, no one else has ever met her either, since she was not real. Maybe the Patriots would have played better and would be headed to the Super Bowl if they had been playing for imaginary, dead girlfriends.

President Obama's Inauguration was this week, which opens up the opportunity to talk about gun control, Michelle Obama's fashion sense, the debt ceiling, NRA, and executive orders.

There is a growing theory floating around that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax perpetrated by the government to push through stricter gun control measures.

TV and movie stars that have recently made headlines: Nikki Minaj, Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Jodie Foster, Anna Kendrick, Lena Dunham, Amy Poehler, Jessica Chastain, Justin Timberlake, Quentin Tarantino, Jamie Foxx, Claire Danes, and Tina Fey.

People who have died recently and are jumping up through the search engines: Conrad Bain, Stan Musial, and Pauline (Popo) Friedman Phillips (better known as Dear Abby). Natalie Wood even made a comeback as new evidence about her death has surfaced.     ← (HA! unintentional pun)

Once again, I want to see if using these highly searched terms will bring more traffic. If it happens to this post as well, then I will know that it was not a coincidence. I will not be doing this experiment again and hate having to read about sports in order to know what is going on anyway. I actually had to look up the Falcons to see what city they play for. Although, the Manti Te'o story is intriguing. Back to regular posts in a few days.

I couldn't even find a way to work in a Nickelback joke.

Lumineers - Mega - Java - UFC - Wral - Frank Zamboni - Stacie Halas - Chief Keef - Amber Alert - Martin Luther King, Jr. - Stuart Scott - Golden Globes 2013 - Lincoln - Seahawks - 2014 Corvette - Miss America 2013 - Aaron Schwartz - Ganster Squad - Oscars - Beasts of the Southern Wild - NRA - scandal - People's Choice Awards - Sacramento Kings - Bethenny Frankel - Pokemon X and Y - Comcast - Pretty Little Liars - Elvis Presley - David Bowie - Rob Parker - Paulina Gretzky - Social Security - ABC Family - Justin Bieber smoking weed - A J McCarron - Katherine Webb - Huell Howser - The Bachelor - Google Docs - Alex Jones - Piers Morgan - IRS - CES 2013 - Chuck Hagel - NHL Lockout - Downtown Abbey

Nickelback sucks!

Blog Traffic OR Fifty Shades of Grey

I've said many times that I write for me. I enjoy writing and would continue to do it even if no one ever saw what I wrote. However, I can comfortably admit that I have an egotistical side as well. I love knowing that people do read what I am writing and really enjoy knowing that people enjoy it.

Since starting the Pish Posh Challenge, I have noticed something incredible happen on this blog. Take a look at my stats.

Last month on September 6, I wrote my first post for the Pish Posh Challenge and have written almost every day since then. Once I started this challenge, my traffic took off. I had to blog for 15 months before I hit a total of 6,000 page views. At my last check, I've had over 6,600 in just the last thirty days! That's more traffic in one month than I used to get in a year!

I believe there are several reasons for this. First, I have been posting much more content than I normally do. This means that my regular readers are stopping by to visit more often to read the newest post and are driving up my numbers. Next, I have to give some credit to Pish Posh since I link up to her blog every week and start pulling traffic from the people that are visiting her and participating in the challenge for themselves. I also have to give a shout out to the great guys over at Dude Write. I submit a post to them almost every week and pull traffic from their visitors as well. They even threw an award my way a few weeks ago.

However, a more careful look at my stats shows that I have been looking at this all the wrong way. Look at my numbers for the month of September.

Of my 6,000+ views last month, 13.6% of them occurred on a single day! I got 830 hits on September 10 because of a piece that I didn't even write that month. That day 758 of that day's page views were all to a post I wrote a year ago about My Remembrance of 9/11. That post only got about 50 visits back when I wrote it!
Fifty Shades of Grey
Even if we take away the increased traffic of that day, I would still have had the highest traffic month to date, however I feel that I cannot ignore the evidence that is before me. Using a little forethought, I am confident that I could funnel traffic to my site.
Fifty Shades of Grey
I saw a similar thing happen a year ago when I wrote about the UARS satellite falling out of the sky. It was a current event and I wrote about it the day it was supposed to fall. My traffic exploded! In order to capitalize on this trend I need to jump on board the flow of the web and try to predict what people will be searching for.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Tonight was the first presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney. This is big news. Just mentioning their names in my post may get me a hundred extra visitors each since hundreds of thousands of people will be online for the next few days searching this topic. Of course, in order for the search engines to take my site seriously, I probably need to use their names more than once.
Fifty Shades of Grey
MITT ROMNEY. I'm hoping the bold will get Google's attention better…or maybe I should use a bigger font and brighter colors.  BARACK OBAMA!
Fifty Shades of Grey
In order to really draw traffic, I could link to the websites of each candidate.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Click here to visit Mitt Romney's site.
Click here to visit Barack Obama's site.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Obviously, if I am going to use this tactic, I don't want to miss out on any of the potential traffic that could come from people looking for this topic but using different search criteria. I need to make sure to include other terms and names, including links whenever available.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Michelle Obama - Joe Biden - Fox News - Ann Romney - Hillary Clinton - Paul Ryan - Rush Limbaugh - CNN - Ann Coulter - Bill Clinton - Bill O'Reilly - Bill Maher - Obamacare - Medicaid - Debates - Focus Groups - Jim Lehrer - Republican - Democrat - Libertarian - Vegetarian - Pedestrian
Fifty Shades of Grey
It looks like this post has the potential to get more traffic than any I have ever written. Nevertheless, I don't want to limit myself by missing out on the searches that may be about things not pertaining to politics. I better throw in a few more to get some REAL traffic.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Let's talk about Honey Boo Boo and the $15,000 per episode raise that her family got. I could discuss the latest traffic violations of Lindsey Lohan or the incident of Amanda Bynes locking herself in a doughnut shop bathroom. Justin Bieber caught his own fever and puked on stage for his first show of the new Believe tour.
Fifty Shades of Grey
The Fast and Furious weapons scandal has appeared in the news again.. Syria and Turkey still aren't getting along. We are still dealing with health care, illegal immigration, educational woes, and Brittany Spears on The X Factor. There is no end to the things I could talk about to bring in traffic. Lets throw in a few more terms just to be safe.
Fifty Shades of Grey

Fifty Shades of Grey

Fifty Shades of Grey - NFL - 30 Rock - bath salts - bacon crisis - unemployment - eBay - Breaking Bad - referee strike - planking - diet - bloggers - Liam Neeson - Pepsi - China - ESPN - embassy - Starbucks - teachers' strike - Tupac - Google - Avengers - Benjamin Netanyahu - zombie apocalypse - Navy Seals - 2012 - McRib - Sons of Anarchy - legalization - Dallas Cowboys - Afghanistan - Charlie Sheen - climate change - pit bulls - conspiracy - Mayans - Hurricane Isaac - J.K. Rowling - education - vampires - Tea Party - Nikki Minaj - bullying
Fifty Shades of Grey
Let's throw a few major search words out there for good measure to pull in some more.

SEX - PORN - NUDITY - X RATED - BOOBS - ANTHONY WEINER

Fifty Shades of Grey
If I can pull traffic in this way and continue to predict the upcoming trends, then it won't matter if I am writing quality pieces. I could quit working so hard. In fact, if I can get my numbers high enough and keep them there, then I could sell ad space and start making money with my blog.

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In reality, I hate it when this happens. While it is exciting to see a jump in the numbers, I want people to come to my site because they actually intended to read what I wrote. When something in the news sparks an idea for a post, the traffic I end up getting because of the search terms they use lands them on my site  for only a few seconds. My UARS satellite piece jumped to the second most popular post within hours of it being posted, despite the scores of better material I had written. It jumped to the top due to topic rather than quality. I want traffic that will stay and continue to read and possibly even click over to some older posts because they liked what they saw. The only way to do that is to produce quality material. That is how bloggers grow their audience.

I love writing and I love my readers and the jumps in numbers are cool, but it's the repeat traffic that gets me the most excited.

However, I will be curious to see what kind of traffic this post gets.

Learning Curve

After spending over an hour staring at my keyboard trying to figure out what to write today, I started perusing the archives of my blog. I lost track of the fact that I was supposed to be writing and started playing with all the settings and tools in Blogger. I've looked at all these before, but I learned a few new things.

I figured out how to back up my blog. I've always heard this was a good idea in case crazed zombie hordes attack the Blogger servers, but had never done it. So I downloaded the entire content of my blog. I didn't want to just have it on my hard drive, so I uploaded another copy to my online storage at Google Drive. I don't really know if that was a good idea since both Drive and Blogger are powered by Google, but I figure if Google ever goes down, the world is probably seconds away from implosion anyway…so, it's not really going to matter.

Once I felt that Blogger wasn't entertaining me anymore, I moved on and stumbled upon how to embed individual tweets into a blog post.

What if all the people who danced with signs to advertise stores went on strike? That would be the best picket line ever?
— Brett Minor (@brettminor) September 24, 2012

"Get off your high horse!" - Veterinarian who prescribed medical marijuana.
— Brett Minor (@brettminor) September 18, 2012

I had to throw these in simply because I learned how to do it. Apparently, this is a pretty simple process, but I never knew about it because no one told me and I missed the press release. Also, Twitter never sends me letters to introduce their new features. Consider this your warning that my next several posts will probably have tweets interspersed in them. And if you're not already a Twitter follower, now's a good time to do it.

After playing with my new Twitter toy for a while, I wandered over to Google Analytics to see what search terms are leading people to my site. Here are some of the stranger ones.

jackass whisperer

All of the guys on Jackass are pretty loud except when they are whispering to the camera about how they are about to strip someone naked, throw him onto a bus of nuns and then hold the doors shut while they throw snakes in the windows. To my knowledge, I have never discussed these things on my blog, so I don't understand how it brings them to my site, but I welcome the traffic. Although, I am curious to try an experiment. Here is the cast list for the most common Jackass characters: Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Ryan Dunn, Chris Pontius, Steve-O, Preston Lacy, Brandon DiCamillo. Let's see if that influences my search results.

angry turkey
I briefly mentioned my Angry Birds addiction several months ago and turkeys are birds, so I guess this works. Plus, most turkeys I have seen appear to be angry, but I would be angry too if I was a bird who couldn't fly and is basically only good for being eaten.

when i miss you i re-read our old conversations and smile like an idiot
This one actually popped up several times with just slight variations. I do often re-read my old posts because I think I'm brilliant and it does make me smile like an idiot, but I had no idea Google knew that. These search engines are getting spookily powerful. I am getting the red squiggly lines under the word 'spookily', but I know what I am trying to say and I believe that's the best word - even if spell check says it's not a word.

karate vs taekwondo
I hope the person searching this found his answer when he got here. I don't remember writing about either one.

no outside food
This one I have no problem with. People shouldn't be eating while reading my posts. It's just rude.

butcher clown

Click picture for
clown butcher post

This one is kind of creepy. Not only because someone would be searching for this one to begin with, but also the fact that I actually have a picture of a butcher clown on my site.

naked redheads   
I don't know what I wrote that caused this search to lead people to my blog, but I could get behind this one.
 
amputee cheerleader
I have written about my buddy Adam several times. He is an amputee, but I believe the person coming to my blog hoping to satisfy their strange fetish is greatly disappointed when they find his picture. Although, if there's a market for it, maybe I should put Adam in a short skirt and we could start a website.