Driving Traffic, Building a Following, and Owning the Interwebs, Plus Teh Google

While we continued to rack up the traffic for our NUDE bikini chicks posts, we dropped alarmingly in site visit time. At one point about two months ago, visit time had dropped to less than forty seconds per page view. Not good. We are back up to 1:34 per load now. That is much more acceptable, although it is cool as all get out when that length jumps up around three or four minutes for the day.

Also, since this traffic experiment starting with little planning on our Rima Fakih NUDE post, we have reached number one on Teh Google for every single keyword we attempted. So far, I have tried twenty-two different phrases and not one have we missed the number one slot. I guess I should do the same stuff for College Gameday!!! (As a disclaimer, I have not done anything over the top for College Gameday because I want that to be a solely organic hit on our weekend scoreboard posts. So far, we are not too far off on that.)

Also, during this period, we have picked up a total of twenty-four new Teh Google Blog Followers, almost fifty e-mail subscribers, and have stabilized at 138 RSS subscribers. I am still not too convinced that Feedburner's RSS stats are right. The biggest fluctuation I get on a daily basis is about six adds or subtracts. Dude, remember when we lost over 60-80 in one day?

I make no bones about trying to put together a money making outfit on Teh InterBlarx lately. Architecture got shot in DEEZ NUTZ when y'all elected Barry Obama.

By the way, I added the Pay Pal "Donation" button a little over a week ago and wanted to say a Hell's YEAH! Thank you folks for dropping your hard earned dust on poor little ol' me. That is very humbling to receive the kicks from y'all. I appreciate it in buckets. If I ever miss the Thank You to anyone, send me an F-Bomb e-mail and I'll return that cash POST HASTE. My Grandmother would kick my ass if I missed the Thank You note.

Now, lemme tell y'all how I got so interested in this stuff. I got a direct message on Twittah one night from an internet marketer asking why I did not return the add. It kinda shocked me because those marketers add me all the time and I never added them and a few days later, they would dump me. When dude called me out, I checked out his site and started reading everything. I found a few links and ran across a bunch of FREE!!! information on Blorking and Making Dust Blorking.
The amount of the information that I have consumed in a very short time is mind boggling. I have studied this stuff minimally three hours a day for quite some time. Yes, I have freaking bags under my eyes, too.

But, dammit, this stuff is interesting as all get out, too.

Since I started paying attention to what I was actually doing, traffic to my business site has picked up, too. If you could benefit from Local Traffic to your website, you should pay attention to Google Places. I added a Lexington listing to my Places thingy yesterday and am going to keep a close eye on my ranking. Please keep in mind, I am NOT spending one single cent for the traffic right now. Teh Google has already sent me two hundred and fifty bucks of ad credit, too. I have not used a single dime. I have not used any of their tags, either.

For some reason, Teh Google is throwing free advertising around like nuts right now. How much do you think one of these billboards would help your local business?

Let's just be honest about the future of business. You know that the economy is really on a back-sliding path and there is very little we can do about that for a while. Not only that, but the debt that our country is saddled with is going to keep us down for a damned long time. We have to find new sources of income.

Also, when you really think about how we do business, find someone to engage us in that business, and ultimately close that business, we do not search for our partners the same way that we did just ten years ago. We "Google" shit. No longer is our competition just Hank down the road, we are competing against Bhaji in India.

We have to adjust, too. We have to pay close attention to the changes that occur almost daily with the Google algorithms. We just got that "Instant Search" thingy and now, Teh Google is trying out a FULL PAGE PREVIEW!

So, here we go. If we have a typical storefront, brick and mortar widget shop, we now have to become masters of the INTERBLARGS. That is the new yellow pages. We have to have Facebook pages and groups, a Twitter account, You Tube, etc. And we have to produce killer content for all of them. Twitter and Facebook have their own tips and tricks for driving traffic, but You Tube has gone all in for marketing. We are back to metadata, tags, and annotations on our VIDEO!

You know what you need? How the Web Works. We gotta just stop, back up, and learn all of the terminology. Free video lesson stuff.

Then we have to start all over with the way things are set up on our blogs and sites.

And of course, our blogs have to be monetized to the hilt. Obama has killed traditional means of income making, y'all.

And networking is vital to our success. Building your contacts and your online community is the new cold calling.

Search Engine Optimization is another tool that must be mastered.

Traditional methods of lead generation are probably going to help you in your quest to fight back against Obamanomics, but some methods of online deal closing are different and tactics are not the same.

While I am thinking about it, the comment reply and subscription thingy is really important now that fewer and fewer people are actually surfing blogs rather than reading the feed. This tip is specifically for those of you on Wordpress, add "Subscribe to Comments" plug-in. There is also a plug-in for Threaded Comments. If you want that one, too, just hit me up and I'll see if I can find it. Mayor, I'm talking to you. If you want to see it in action, check this out. The cool thing about this comment threading is that the administrator can actually see how many subscribers (and their info, too) to the comment thread there are. That is helpful to see what kind of posts get more interest.

Wordpress has also added SMS Notifications and Controls. I am not sure that this will be helpful for much longer when my phone has a danged 64" screen almost and my browser is almost as big on it as the laptop. Plus, the phone is blazing fast, too.

Oh, speaking of the RSS readers, this reader theme is pretty cool. Gotta have Greasemonkey, though.

I gotta mention this post from Basil. Resize a bunch of images at the same time using Picasa. Dude, I wish I had this info when I started my Tumblr because I decided that I was going to use the same dimensions on all the images.

If you use Google Chrome, they added instant search to the address bar. Folks, it is becoming a full-time job keeping up with all the advancements that are coming out.

I noticed this in my G-Mail the other day. Rather than actually exposing yourself to a website to unsubscribe, Teh Google will do it for you!!!

Here's a quick post explaining sharing on Teh Google Docs. This can come in handy for doling out information to all your peeps. you can have different pricing sheets for different clients. You know, if you are doing business with one of those Ole Miss Black Bears, you can give them access to the gouging prices.

As a kinda throw away link, if you have an iPod Shuffle like a certain friend of mine, these headphones look like they would be wicked-awesome.

Sorry that I have been remiss in doing the three videos that I have promised. I am certainly going to handle that this weekend. I got one on Teh Google Docs, one on the proxy for the scoreboard, and hopefully I'll get to the surprise one if I have time.

OBAMA SUCKS.

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