BoyandGirlScouts.com – News, Opinion, Advice

21 June 2009

A Year in the Life

Posted by admin under: blog news .

Well, it’s been one year since the blog started with the post “Welcome to boyandgirlscouts.com”. Happy birthday to us! When I first started it I had visions of being the go-to place for people to talk about Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and get information for them. Then I discovered Scouter.com which is the actual go-to place. Fine. I thought I’d be the place for some advice and teach a little based on my personal experiences in my troop. Then I found out that Boy Scout Trail already had that market cornered with quite a number of other blogs way ahead of me in that department. Could I parlay my positions in the Scouts to give me extra authority? Scouting blogs have more professionals, Den Leaders, Scoutmasters, and Commissioners than you can shake a stick at. Fine, I’ll troll through the news and communicate up to date stories faster than anyone else which is really what I was interested in. What is this ScoutingNews.org place that’s already been doing that for longer than I’ve been around? Dang. Now we’ve got Insane Scouter and Half Eagle automating things so fast no human being could possibly keep up. Sheesh. Fine. I guess I’ll have to do what I originally thought would be cool. I’ll write a blog at my own pace full of things I think are interesting and try to promote it the best way I can. That’s what I’ve got. After a year I’ve learned a few things.

No matter how awesome or important you think something is, it is unlikely others will have the same interest level. I poured my heart and soul into an article about Louisiana Governor Jindal vetoing some legislation last year. I called the Scouting Executive in the area affected, I culled through hours of records to find references to the obscure origins of the programs being cut. I left messages. I worked on that one post all day long. Then I went out to other sites and talked about it, including writing the post so that I’d send a pingback to Michelle Malkin’s website since she get’s tens of thousands of hits per day. There was some attention paid, but after all the effort I saw things like a throwaway post listing Girl Scout swaps getting more hits. You just can’t force people to care about things the same way you do.

I also learned that if you stop writing people stop visiting the blog. No surprise there, but I was happy to find that many come back if you start writing again. You can’t figure out what will be popular when you first write it. Some things just hit a sweet spot of timing and interest. Others go off a while later like a grenade after you forgot you wrote about it. Linking to others does not guarantee a linkback so it’s a good thing I linked simply because I wanted to. If I had expectations I think I would have been disappointed.

Leaving comments in others’ blogs can increase traffic to yours especially if you get into the Robert Dinero type of “circle of trust”.  Pointing readers to other blogs actually helps yourself out because you start sounding like you know about these other cool sites.

Google ads doesn’t pay. Other ad companies want to place ads that they select for you. Telling someone when you’re starting out that you get about hundred pageviews per day will discourage them from trying to advertise with you. I was actually happy with that traffic.

Spammers will try to kill you with the amount of junk they send. So, find a good way to filter that out. Most blogs have the captcha comment system where you have to type in a disguised codeword in order to leave a comment. Being paranoid I insisted on approving everything myself, but found a Wordpress plug-in that filtered out most of the spam after having hand-deleted about 2500 spam comments (the plug-in has caught an additional 19,000).

Google analytics and Wordpress  statistics are addicting. And they don’t match each other. Whatever. My top posts for the year were: BSA Height/Weight Controversy (2,497 views), Update to Barack Obama Was a Boy Scout (1,130 views), Barack Obama Was a Boy Scout (1,101 views). So, if you can get on the national news wire or have the subject of your story get elected President of the United States you’ll definitely get some traffic. Thanks to BuffaloEagle, Larry Armstrong, Rully Dassad, and Mark Forbes for getting me all my site visitation. I quite literally couldn’t have done it without them.

My biggest traffic day was the nexus of the weight story when I got 1,021 hits on May 12^th. I’m averaging a little more than 300 hits per day now with bigger days spiking into the 4 or even 5 hundreds.  My total pageviews for the year is 64,476. More people find their way to my blog by typing something having to do with Barack Obama and Boy Scouts than any other combination of search words. According to the Google map I’ve been visited by a majority of the countries in the world which is just so cool I could dance a jig. I can’t let it go without listing them:  United States (all 50 states, thank you very much), United Kingdom, Canada, Australia (yes this is in descending order of visitation), Germany, India, Australia, France, Philippines, Iraq, Netherlands (Hi, cousins!), Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Japan, Spain, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, China, Singapore, Mystery country of unknown location, Ireland, (really? More people from Pakistan than Ireland?), Malaysia, Indonesia (Hi, more cousins!), Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Sri Lanka (Or is it Ceylon?), Saudi Arabia (but only the men), South Korea, Egypt,  Romania, Tunisia, Puerto Rico, Thailand, Czech Republic, Austria, Iran, Greece, New Zealand, Russia, Qatar, Lebanon, Portugal, Uganda, Hungary, Chile, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Venezuela, Taiwan, Israel, Jamaica, Hong Kong (I thought they were part of China now), Bahamas, Bahrain, Malta, Finland, Macedonia, Kuwait, Guam, Bulgaria, U.S. Virgin Islands, Lithuania, Peru, Serbia, Bangladesh (I can’t even remember the old name), Slovakia, Colombia, Latvia, Ukraine, Trinidad and Tobago (which is apparently one place, not two), Vietnam, Belize, Afghanistan (Hi, ScoutingNews!), Iceland, Mongolia, Senegal, Antigua and Barbuda, Ethiopia, Algeria, Palestinian Territory (more cousins!), Ecuador, Ghana, Moldova, Oman, Grenada, Guatemala, Slovenia (that one sounds made up), Gibraltar, Estonia (Ha! Funny that those two are next to each other in the list), Uruguay, Maldives, Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Benin, Morocco, Belarus, Mauritius, Guadeloupe, Malawi, Ivory Coast, Syria, Tanzania, Dominica, Sudan, Zimbabwe, British Virgin Islands, Suriname, Bermuda, Jordan, Cyprus, Anguilla, Croatia, Bolivia, Libya, Aruba, Zambia, Tonga, Burundi, French Polynesia, Saint Lucia, Cambodia, and Panama. You don’t have to read that list if you don’t want to. Oops! Too late! The map shows this big Greenland empty space and I’m still missing most of western Africa, but I’m not complaining. Awesome!

Twitter is incredibly useful for drawing in traffic and getting news quickly. Facebook and Myspace would probably be good, too, but I don’t have the energy to log into those more than once every few weeks, except for my Venture Crew news. There are cool tools that let you rank yourself against other websites in case you start feeling cocky. Alexis was kind enough to tell me that I’m so insignificant that they can’t be bothered to know about me.

Everyone trying to sell electronics and sheds wants to trade links with me for some reason.

And after a year of blogging off and on, it’s still fun! So, thanks and see you on the next post! J

Update: I forgot one other stat I wanted to share. I ended the year with 987 posts. I was going to try to hustle and get it to an even 1,000, but ultimately I decided to let it go. It only I hadn’t taken such long breaks I probably could have gotten there. Thanks for all your compliments and good wishes. And a couple of cool story ideas, too. Thanks!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Red Letter Day
• Behind the Curtain, Just for Fun
• One Month Anniversary
• Your Scouting Twitter List Is Ready
• American-Armenian Scouts Remember

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