500 unique visitors per day

Welcome to the RSS feed for Mike's blog.

This might be a nice time to stop for a few minutes to reflect on this site’s website traffic. I honestly don’t care for page loads, it’s unique (and returning) visitors that interest me most. And here you all are over the past month:

chart

I’m currently getting about 500 unique visitors per day (max: 650, min: 370) to this blog… Three and a half years ago, I went from 0 to 100 visitors in six months but the in-between period saw me blogging fairly inconsistently.

In that time, I’ve started a few YouTube channels – mostly for messing around but one particular Philosophy-based channel that I started in 2008 currently has 2,467 subscribers and over 40,000 total upload views. I won’t tell you what the channel name is yet, but it’s a public channel with just six videos on it. Feel free to see if you can find it. I may reveal this channel name in the future.

So, talking about videos, you may have noticed my new YouTube channel; the video version of my blog. It was hard enough choosing a name and recording and editing video takes more time than writing a blog post but it reaches a bigger audience, which is cool.

The lessons I learn making videos will apply directly to my business, as I plan to make video tutorials and marketing videos for all my own products in due course.

Generally the most popular posts are split between how to tutorials, geek reviews and astronomy. Reviews like this and gadgets like this and how to posts like this and how to build your home server get the most traffic.

A brief note on SEO

When I was younger, I used to attend a lot of networking events like those held by Business Networking International and Ecademy. They were generally meetings where local businesses would meet regularly to exchange leads and advice. Each group had it’s own butcher, baker and candlestick maker (yes, I even met a wax worker!) and every single group had it’s own “go to IT person”. Not much room for outsiders then, but I made and earned a few referrals and some sound business contacts during this time. The troubling thing was that I met dozens of “SEO” experts. Every single time they opened their mouths I would cringe. “We can get you to the top of Google”, one would exclaim as if Google was some local hilltop summit that could be reached if only the service provider was gleamed with enough cash.

My retort to them was the same every single time. “If I search Google for “SEO services”, will you be on the front page?”, I would say. The response was invariably ‘no’. But these modern age snake oil salespeople will invariably take your money anyway and provide essentially nothing but placebo in return.

This needs to be an article in its own right, but let me tell you now what the key to doing well in the search engine rankings is:

Don’t be a dick
Produce freely available, genuinely useful, quality content regularly.
Interact with people

Spamming keywords in META tags, jostling things around and producing monthly performance spreadsheets will not translate into conversions. Neither will simply making a video of your products and services and plopping it onto YouTube. “Don’t be a dick” means what it says. You cannot follow an SEO procedure to win views, you cannot “optimise” your online content (past making sure that the markup is clean) and search engines make it their business to match good content to their search. They will find your content if it’s good. And if you want to take advantage of organic search engine optimisation then you’ll need to get out there and interact with your customers online via all the channels they use; forums, social media, video, and so on.

I have never sold SEO services (despite being asked to provide them) and never will. “SEO services” are the technological equivalent of homeopathy, tea leaf reading and snake oil.

File:Spring pouchong tea leaves on plate.jpg
Want to know where your site will be listed in Google? Why not try reading tea leaves instead?