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Welcome Plutonians!

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I haven't looked at my blog stats in some time, but today I loaded up the pages and started poking around.

Boy, was I surprised!

I'm getting a killer amount of traffic for my story, Pluto Fighting for it's life. The strange thing is that there is nothing special about it -- it's just a story from last year about how Pluto got demoted from a planet. There are some pictures of Pluto and Charon, and a picture of Disney's Pluto, which was mentioned in the news story (fair use, Disney)

After looking around some more, I found out that most visitors were coming in after doing an image search for Pluto, and it wasn't the planet -- google has me highly listed on their search page. Seems if you go to Google, type "pluto" then search for images, my site comes up on the first page.

This means about 3 thousand visits a month, at the current rate. I don't mind the visitors, but it seems kind of strange that I'm writing a personal diary and stuff about technology and management and a huge hunk of folks are coming to see a Disney cartoon image. I'm tempted to pull it, and I'm tempted to try to make a few bucks from it with some kind of advertising, but as it is, it's just one of those strange blog anomalies.

What I'm learning, after two years of blogging, is that a history of bloggging is the most important thing you can have. Each article you write builds up a library of links on sites like Google where people can come and find your work. I thought when I started that blogging was an immediate gratification kind of activity -- write a great story, and people will show up. What I'm finding is that blogging is much more akin to farming -- you plant, water, weed, do the best you can, and slowly things blossom.

Over the years, I've given up on blogging as a commercial activity. Sure, I'm still thinking about trying some kind of ad program, just out of curiosity as to how it works more than anything else. But to me, I've found that I have to blog for myself, not anybody else. The more I go chasing what I think will get immediate ratings, the more I lose interest. And you can't lose interest -- blogging is for the long-haul.

However, I can't help play around with topics and such. Perhaps I will do another story this week with some kind of popular slant. I guess I'm just too much of a wonk. I wonder if the Pluto article process can be repeated? Welcome Plutons! Hope you like technology.

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Comment Policy: I really, really, really enjoy comments, but if all you have to offer is general platitudes like how happy you are to have found my site and what a wonderful place it is, I will delete your comment and report your comment as spam. Please try to either tell me I am wrong, sympathize with my point, expand on what I'm saying, or offer your own experiences or opinions. If you just want a link your best bet is to just ask for one. Probably won't work, but at least be honest about it. No name-calling and please keep the profanity as low as possible. If your grandma can't read it or you wouldn't say it in person, don't write it here. Thanks.

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on May 20, 2007 2:12 PM.

Beach book list was the previous entry in this blog.

New Jeep Looks Strangely Familiar is the next entry in this blog.

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