Friday, April 29, 2016

Achieving One Million Hits on My Second Life Blog!



 Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.
Albert Einstein



         
          Be forewarned – This story is a brag!

          Yes, it’s about me!

          Why shouldn’t it be?  After all, it’s my blog!  (Significant Other’s eyes rolls while asking why should this be any different from any of my other brags, er, stories.)  

          What’s the big deal?

          Well, I’ll tell you!  (Significant Other threatens to leave the room if I don’t get to the point.)

          My blog went over the one million hits mark at about midnight SLT on Sunday, April 24, 2016!  (Significant Other wouldn’t let me stay up to see it happen and insisted that I go to bed.  No, Significant Other isn’t my mother.) 

          In just over five years of blogging about Second Life (SL), I’ve managed to hit this goal.  Yes, some have done it quicker, but most don’t get anywhere near this mark at all!  


          How’d I do this?

          You mean besides writing over three hundred blog posts?  

          First, my blog of choice here is Google’s Blogger.  While I’ve since moved onto WordPress in Real Life (RL), Blogger is a very safe way to start blogging, is free, and is plugged into the Google family of products.  

          I did have some false starts along the way.

          CNN iReports unceremoniously dumped their SL community onto the street not long after I’d started there and I had to scramble to find a replacement.  That’s where Blogger came in.  (I’ll bet CNN iReports wishes they had this traffic going to their site!)

          I initially posted inworld distributing links to my weekly stories via notecards until I discovered social media.  

I started using Facebook to reach out to other SL residents until I got dumped by them in one of their purges. (No hard feelings, my offer to interview Mark Zuckerberg still stands!  And, even in the world of Facebook, a million hits is a big number which I bet they’d rather have than their competitors.)    

          Eventually, I started using Twitter and that’s when my traffic started to really pick up.  Adding Google+ helped.  Using Hootsuite, a social media account manager, allowed me to automate.  Twitter’s recent change in their timeline algorithm has set me back some but I’m working on some new ideas.  Keep an eye out for new social media channels and content!

          It hasn’t been easy!  (Not to complain!)

          I’ve posted weekly with only one exception over the last five years.  (Significant Other has been great about letting me build this posting routine into our lives.)  Thinking up new story ideas and researching them is harder than writing the stories.  

          But, I feel good about my progress!  (Significant Other says, “Enough already!”)

          There have been many other SL bogs that posted a few stories and then went dark.  (Sadly, some of these had excellent content.) Some post only once a year.  Others post regularly but get no traffic because they don’t do any promotion.  

          I’ve survived!

          A few observations about SL blogging after one million hits.

          First, this is only anecdotal, but SL social media activity seems to have been declining as if late.  I’m unsure if this has to do with less posting by writers or social media’s move away from organic growth to paid ads.  

          Next, many SL bloggers seem to be either posting less or stopping altogether.  I’m not sure why.  Could interest in SL be fading?  

          Finally, the next big thing in SL is sorely needed to revive interest in blogging and social media about this very important virtual world.  

          Now, I’d like to thank all who of you who made my achievement possible!

          I’m sure it was more than my three loyal readers doing this!  (You know who you are and not to worry!  I won’t out you!)  

          And, no, I didn’t hit this goal by reading my own posts!  (Sheesh, not even Significant Other accused me of that!)  

          I’d like to thank L’il Sis and her posse at First UCC for being the first to congratulate me in public for hitting this goal!  

          Then, to all those inworld who let me tell their stories to you, my readers! 

          I’m in your debt and will always cherish our time together!   

As always, I’m grateful to all inworld for their kindness and time in stopping to talk with a stranger who was passing through their lives!  

          My Twitter handle is @webspelunker.  Please feel free to follow me and I’d be happy to follow you.

I can be found on Google+ as webspelunker Ghostraven.

My flickr Photostream is located here.

On Skype I’m webspelunker Ghostraven.

I welcome feedback from readers, please either comment on my blog or e-mail me at webspelunker@gmail.com . 

          If you would like to read about my other adventures in Second Life
please click here

          Open roads and kind fires!          

6 comments:

Hibiscus Hastings said...

Congratulations! I can't even imagine one million. You have certainly worked hard all these years. Best wishes to Significant Other too.

Caroline Resident said...

Webby,

Its cool to have traffic and a great reward for the work you have put into it.

BUT:

I feel have to qualify the number you are talking about, at the risk of causing a bit of desillusion in you.

First of all, what is a "hit"? A hit is not a person or a visit. It it simply the request from a "client" (i.e. browser) to download that page. This is applicable to all kind of technical clients such as browsers, bots and crawlers. As your blog consists of a huge number of pages (due to the exzessiv use of tags), everytime Google crawls your blog the counter tracks several thousand "hits". The same applies to other search engines. If you want to do an experiment: delete the tags and you see a significant decrease in "hits" simply becausethe search engines have less pages to download.

In addition you have typically numerous spam bots every day trying to either access the comment section or at least leaving their URL (i.e www.best-social-media-buttons.net) in your stats.

Secondly those counters are extremelly unreliable to start with. Do you have something more accurate to see where the actual traffic is coming from? How much is actually from twitter, Google, referring sites etc?

Do you know how many pages one sitor is looking at? Lets say the average is 4 pages per visit (which would be high) then 1.000.000 "hits" would be 250.000 visitors.

Realistically from the about 16.000 hits you had in average per month in the last 5 year at least half of that is bots, crawlers and reloads which makes it 7.500 (max!), which represents about 4.000 visitors per month.

Still not bad for a niche blog! But nothing to get too excited about, especially not when professional web analytic tools like this one:

https://www.similarweb.com/website/webspelunker.blogspot.de
can not find enough traffic data, to provide an analysis! Why not? Cause they dont track bots and crawlers!

This is actually how it is suppossed to look:
https://www.similarweb.com/website/second-life-adventures.com

To me another pretty fair indication about the real traffic of your site is the amount of referrals I get from the links on your site to mine. Those are displayed in the sidebar of all your pages. My total count of klicks from those for 2016(yes all year) is: 7 (seven!).

Hope you land not to hard on earth again, now that I did kick you from your cloud. Oh and get rid of that illusion counter and use Google analytics instead.

Would love to know what significant other says to this comment.

Your friend

Carol

Caroline Resident said...

Ops

Did you delete my comment?

webspelunker said...

Caroline, Nope! You posted it on my Bitcoin article! ;)

webspelunker said...

Hibiscus, Many thanks!

Caroline Resident said...

Oh shit, can you move it to the correct place?