Back in December of 2005 I added Google Adsense features to my site. As I said back then, I have no illusions of actually making money off of Adsense. Starting year three, my “a buck or two a month” estimate is holding remarkably true. I’m up to about $45 sitting in the Google coffers, waiting to reach $100 so I can claim my riches.
More interesting to me is the ebb and flow of statistics and traffic relating to my site. Back when I started with Adsense, a good day on my site was about 50 page impressions: now a good day is about 500 page impressions, and a “slow” day is about 150. So traffic is up, but arguably the number and variety of people exploring the web is also up.
But why do people come to my web site? I don’t do anything to “advertise” it, and I break one of the cardinal rules of building an audience for your blog: my topics are all over the map. A good blog is one that picks a specific topic and sticks to it: I, on the other hand, blog about whatever interests me at the moment. Yes, that means much of what you see here is related to technology (computers), computer games, and science. But there are personal rants here as well, and boring stuff about things that have happened around the house.
I have no desire to “restrict” my posting to specific topics, but I think I should do some work to better structure the site by category. I imagine it would be nice for folks interested in my, say, computer hardware, to have a well defined button to push to see that content. That stuff is actually pretty easy to corral here on this site with my current categories, but I don’t think everyone knows how to use those- expect me to make some changes there in the next year to make this easier. I’ll probably be using those buttons at the top of this page for this purpose: my challenge right now is figuring out what categories make the most sense for my visitors.
Why is this a problem? Well, if I look at my Google stats and my own local statistics software, the top handful of “hits” to my site based on keyword searches are:
- Mary Carey
- Teresa Noreen
- Asus M2R23 motherboard problems
- Battlefield 2142 vista
- exploding biceps
Well… I’m not partial to setting up categories based around “sexy women” or “exploding biceps”. And the really odd thing is: I have literally dozens of posts on computer hardware and games, and only a couple of posts regarding models / sexy women, yet somehow those posts drive more traffic than everything else combined. So I’ll have to give this some thought… maybe I need a “Girls Geeks Lust after” page?
The exploding biceps thing, though…that really freaks me out.
P.S.: your challenge for the day is to find the exploding biceps post on this site…
P.P.S: your other challenge is to post a comment on this thread telling me how you found this site, and what might make it easier to find what you want. My guess is, I’ll get zero comments on this topic, since everyone is here looking for partially-clothed women and exploding biceps…
What you need to do is hire some Bikini models… then take pictures of them assembling your latest computer rebuild. 😉
I like it!
Actually, I’m sort of thinking of the following categories:
– Geek miscellany (science, science fiction, and such)
– Gear (computers, game machines, DVRs…)
– Games
– Girls (“females a geek guy might find appealing”; E.G.: 7 of 9; got to pass this by She Who Must Be Obeyed)
– Rants
– Life (stuff about visiting the family, cleaning the house, getting new glasses…)
– Gallery (the existing photo gallery)
I’ll have to see how that fits in the site design/tools I have. The main “home” page would be all of those topics mashed together, but hopefully with shorter summaries. Or that’s my thinking of the moment.
Sounds like an awful lot of work for something that will still be kind of scattered. But if it works for you…
Exploding biceps? I remember that back a few months but why?
You may be right, Oblivions. The idea is that it wouldn’t have to be scattered: you could bookmark (for example) the “Geek Miscellany” page and never see the “Life”, “Girls”, or “Gear” content.
As for the amount of work, my theory is that it wouldn’t be too hard. WordPress has tools that make re-categorizing content fairly easy, so that part shouldn’t be much work. I will probably experiment with the idea in the coming months and see how much work it really is…