How to Blog
According to Alexa, rickey.org is now the 110,716th most visited site for the past week and the 279,491st for the past 3 months. That's a 529% jump in my rankings. Yay. So how did that happen? Well, obviously, it has a lot to do with American Idol, but not without a lot of work on my part to make that happen. Since weekends are slow, I just wanted to share a little bit of stuff behind the scenes here in rickey.org.
But first off, note to self: do not write about religion. Haha. In fairness, my discussion on the Pope was well received, and I found myself calm and collected when dealing with disagreement with my readers. I even ended up on the first page for a search on "Pope Death". Sweet. It's just a sharp contrast from the American Idol posts, so I admit I was taken aback a bit, and had to put my serious hat on. Ick. I just cannot engage in a war with the Christians and Catholics right now -- my constitution can't handle it -- so we'll have to stay away in the meantime. However, this article on How to Blog suggests that I do write about religion (and sex and politics) in order to blog better, so who knows.
Based on that same article, I am now opening up my stats page for a couple of days. Here you will find who's been linking to my site, amount of visitors in the day and the most juicy, what people are searching for on Google and Yahoo to get to rickey.org.
Since we've been all about American Idol lately, I have been tracking down my site's performance on Google and Yahoo and the amount of visitors coming in for the top contenders: Carrie Underwood, Bo Bice, Constantine Maroulis and Anthony Fedorov. We've pretty much owned searches for Anthony Fedorov for a while now, but Carrie's and Bo's have been more of a challenge. For one, we end up on the first page on Google for Carrie, but we're on page 3 in Yahoo. Actually, we used to be on the first page on Yahoo but something happened that I cannot seem to solve yet. I'm particularly anxious about this because the Buzz meter in Yahoo does drive a lot of traffic. (Were back on the first page on Yahoo, so I guess I solved it). I also consider the searches for Constantine and Anwar Robinson gifts from Google, as I have not promoted them as actively as the others. In the future, you might see a post dedicated to Nikko and Vonzell, as I attempt to get Google searches for them too.
Eliminated contestants: These guys generate a lot of traffic then it dies down after a week. Most notable was Mario Vazquez who generated 8800 visitors from Google the day after he left the show. On that day, we were the 57,712nd ranked site on the web. Three weeks later, not too many people are interested.
As some of you may have noticed, I've been running a more dedicated American Idol site called idolforever.com alongside rickey.org. It's a forum, but in reality its really my file dump for the media files I record during the show. Haha. I think last year I was frustrated at having to wait for media files to show up on the Internet that I just decided to make them myself. My goal for 3000 members was fulfilled just last week so I am very happy about that. My current dilemma is the bandwidth issue. I'm currently running out, and it looks like I will buy more server space in a couple of days. I'm beginning to think twice about what I'm doing now since it's quite apparent that I am so dedicated to this. Haha.
The Google Ad performance from rickey.org and the forum have also been interesting. There are certain days where the blog or the forum performs better, although the forum has had consistently higher click-through rates than the blog, meaning for every ad that appears on the page, more people click to it in the forum. I've been having trouble putting a secondary income stream on rickey.org for the simple reason that I do not know where to place the ads. I've decided that content goes first before advertisements for now, for my own well-being actually. I'm not a total sellout. Haha. A minor sellout, but not total. The Google Ads on rickey.org have taught me a lot about this e-commerce thingy and I will be more confident now when I venture into other stuff in the future. I received my first Google check in the mail last week so I am a very happy blogger indeed. Write about what excites you at the moment, and get paid for it, sweet!
Comments. This has been bittersweet, and directly due to the increase in visitors. For one, we now have regular commentors which is so cool! I feel loved. I feel like I'm doing a public service. I feel like giving a Sally Field speech every time someone writes something nice in the comments. However, there have been dispruptive voices every now and then. I don't mind disagreements but the foul language rattles me. Since there are so many entry points in the blog it gets hard to trace sometimes, but I have been deleting and banning some people already. There is however one exception: a Fantasia Barrino post from last year is completely unmoderated and now has 600+ comments of people fighting each other.