Over the last two weeks I’ve been undertaking an experiment to see how the title of a blog post impacts the number of hits it gets; the results have been quite staggering.
Two weeks ago I titled my post “How I made $20,000 in 24 hours”, a wildly misleading title as the post was actually about a couple of photo contests I was considering entering which had a total prize pool of $20,000. It consisted of photos of some native Australian plants and a pet cat and as usual I updated facebook and twitter to tell people I’d just blogged. The following week I posted another entry with very similar content (more plants but this time I had some wild kangaroos and whales which are actually way cooler than a domestic cat) only this time I gave it the less sensational title “Kangaroos, Plants and Whales”. Again, I posted updates on Facebook at Twitter at roughly the same time of day I’d done last week.
Apparently people are more interested in how to get rich quick than kangaroos.
My $20,000 in 24 hours post is already my 2nd most frequented post this year (and number 8 all time), second only to the Barossa Wedding I shot in April and has out paced the kangaroo post three to one. The problem with stretching the truth too much though is it erodes the trust people have in you, and at the risk of sounding a bit preachy trust is one of the most important things any small business can have which is why I changed the title of this post at the last minute (I was going to go with “Most interesting post of the year” but decided it was a bit over the top).
While I’m on the topic of analysing blog visitors here’s a few fast facts I found interesting.
- First post was February 11, 2008, roughly 2 and a half years ago
- There have been 92 subsequent posts, 22 in 2008, 49 in 2009 and 22 in 2010 so far, slightly less than 1 per week.
- 12,503 page views from 7,825 visits from 3,472 unique visitors
- Average time on site 1 minute 33 seconds.
- Visits from 87 countries (!)
- Top 5 countries – Australia (3,053 visits), UK (2,451), USA (763), Ireland (292), Germany (256).
- Most unexpected top 10 country – Belgium at number 9 with 79 visits
- Most unexpected countries generally (it actually blows my mind that anyone I’m not friends with ever reads the blog) – Mongolia, Réunion (apparently it’s a country – look it up!), Iraq, Algeria, Seychelles, Georgia, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Estonia, Venezuala, Oman…..
- 33% of traffic is direct (ie, people typing “simonbills.blogspot.com” into their browser), 22% comes from Facebook, 8% from google with the rest coming from all sorts of different sources such as email links, non-google search engines (2 visits from Ask Jeeves!!), forum postings, other blogs or my main website.
- Google has sent 590 people my way, next highest is Yahoo with 4 then Bing with 3.
My absolute favourite part about looking through my analytics is seeing what sort of crazy stuff people have typed to end up on the blog. When I went to Oktoberfest last year I blogged about how I went to bed early and didn’t really party like I should have, the blog was titled “I suck at Oktoberfest”. Dozens of disappointed googlers probably looking for something else have ended up on my site with searches such as:
- Oktoberfest suck
- Suck Oktoberfest
- Suck in Oktoberfest
- Sucked at Oktoberfest
- Does Oktoberfest suck
- Oktoberfest suck video
- Sucking in Oktoberfest
- Suckingn Oktoberfest
- Oktober fest sucking
On my paparazzi post I misspelt the name of celeb I papped, her actual name is Amelle but by spelling it Emelle I attracted a dozen or so comrades equally perplexed with the spelling of these modern names.
Some other interesting searches have been:
- big wall près de tromso blama
- cheesy 50’s catalogue pose (thanks for sending that one through Ask Jeeves!)
- frisked wearing a suit and tight jeans
- how to gain an extra 60kg
- night owl paparazzi Shoreditch
- photo of rhino attack
- portraits good quirky spots Adelaide (I like that this led to my blog!)
- simon bloz unde photography
- wedding portraits fat people (I’m certain I’ve never put that combination of words together!)
I’ll leave you with the very first photo ever posted on a blog. A self portrait containing 2 things I don’t do nearly enough of any more – use my super wide angle lens, and take photos in the hour after the sun’s gone down with my tripod. Perhaps that can be my challenge for this week…
