BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

One thing that truly amazes me is what people search on this blog. A lot of spam-beloved words, the reason why - escapes me.

From the outside world this blog is being bombarded by queries like “outlook 2007 to thunderbird” or “outlook 2007 thunderbird” or “export outlook 2007 to thunderbird” (all within top 10 of queries). The answer is here: Outlook 2007 to Mozilla Thunderbird conversion.

Another big bunch of people are searching for SitcomTV.com domain. Well, it is for sale if the price is right. Click here to contact me. Alternatively, you can offer a donation that would make the web site (about sitcoms) up and running. Either way - we all win.

Last, but not least bunch is divided by two interests - HTC Advantage 7501 (truly amazing device, but a bit too bulky for every day use - learned it the hard way) and people who are looking to install Pandora on Windows Mobile devices (an amazing service, pretty much the only radio I would like to listen all the time). Preferably for free.

Newcomers this week are attracted by new posts dedicated to .NET technology that I’ve been using for a lot of time now. Since this seems like a great interest - there’s more where it came from. Stay tuned.

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• More fun with Alexa and stats (January 10, 2008): As any blogger I can't help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don't see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it's wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa [...]
• Blog year-end stats recap (December 26, 2007): The blog is, of course, much older. It's just that I a) start taking it seriously and b) moved it to the WordPress on a separate domain from Blogger around May. And, obviously, started blogging more often. I dropped Hits from the chart because it doesn't really give an idea of how traffic is flowing [...]
• Zoundry Blog Editor (January 15, 2008): While contemplating on my ideas of blogging editor I stumbled upon various reviews of existing blogging clients. One of them caught my eye, so I ventured ahead and downloaded Zoundry - free blogging client. I am attempting to write this post in Zoundry, version 1.0.40. Generally, I am not looking for features I came up with [...]

After Halloween long gone and other holidays coming on, I went through Google Trends to see what the trends say. Turns out - Halloween is the most important costume and party holiday. As you can see from the picture above, there is a very strong spike on each Halloween for all three words: “halloween” (blue), “costume” (orange) and “party” (red). There’s no spike on Christmas, no spike on 4th of July, no other spikes as far as I can see.

Note to entrepreneurs - it’s a good idea to set up an emergency costume delivery, or even mobile costume stores. Shouldn’t be a big problem and the higher markup is well justified. Either deliver something ordered online or set up a mobile store so that the whole block could shop.

You might also be interested in reading this:

• More fun with Alexa and stats (January 10, 2008): As any blogger I can't help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don't see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it's wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa [...]
• Yahoo clicks aren`t clicking (March 12, 2007): Today I got a call from one of my clients asking me to check stats with him as he is seeing certain discrepancies in Overture reports. We went in and figured that the number of clicks reported by Overture roughly 3 times larger then what is being reported by AWstats. Upon contact, Yahoo/Overture issued a [...]
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• Blog year-end stats recap (December 26, 2007): The blog is, of course, much older. It's just that I a) start taking it seriously and b) moved it to the WordPress on a separate domain from Blogger around May. And, obviously, started blogging more often. I dropped Hits from the chart because it doesn't really give an idea of how traffic is flowing [...]

As any blogger I can’t help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don’t see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it’s wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa redirect and how that helps your Alexa score.

What I did was I gave out just one redirect link (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.dontdateguy.com) to our friends’ blog DontDateGuy.com on a not very crowded forum and watched stats afterwards. In just several hours I saw a tremendous boost in Alexa’s “curiosity”. Alexa was going over the site like there is no tomorrow, superseded by Google only (but who can beat that guy, eh?). For last 8 days (since the blog became active) Google hit it 143 times, Alexa 93, Yahoo 65 and Ask.com - 27. Comparing to this blog where Alexa also wasn’t showing up - pretty impressive to me.

So I have set up some more redirect links to two aforementioned blogs and will keep watching what will happen by the end of the month.

UPDATE: Alexa’s redirect doesn’t work now. Guess it got abused too much.

You might also be interested in reading this:

• Yahoo clicks aren`t clicking (March 12, 2007): Today I got a call from one of my clients asking me to check stats with him as he is seeing certain discrepancies in Overture reports. We went in and figured that the number of clicks reported by Overture roughly 3 times larger then what is being reported by AWstats. Upon contact, Yahoo/Overture issued a [...]
• RSS Is Your Key To Success (January 15, 2008): Couple of months ago I did a little "research" - I asked people around to find out if they know anything about RSS. Turns out - none of my business-oriented colleagues knows that term. Even more - they have no idea what news aggregator/reader is and actually read news from all the web sites they [...]
• Post Halloween Web Trends (November 7, 2008): After Halloween long gone and other holidays coming on, I went through Google Trends to see what the trends say. Turns out - Halloween is the most important costume and party holiday. As you can see from the picture above, there is a very strong spike on each Halloween for all three words: "halloween" [...]
• Blog year-end stats recap (December 26, 2007): The blog is, of course, much older. It's just that I a) start taking it seriously and b) moved it to the WordPress on a separate domain from Blogger around May. And, obviously, started blogging more often. I dropped Hits from the chart because it doesn't really give an idea of how traffic is flowing [...]