BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

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.

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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 Alexa was going over the site like there is no tomorrow, superseded by Google only (but who can beat that guy, eh?).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.

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• 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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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 to the blog, since Hits in Awstats (that’s the package I am using) counts in all hits on the web site - search bots, pings, etc.

End of the year is a good time for such a recap. Hope the next year will bring more interesting articles and more joy to both the author and the readers of this blog.

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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 [...]
• 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 [...]
• Stats, damn stats and lies. (November 8, 2007): While looking at this web site stats (and I can see many web sites stats) I can't help but notice - the top search keyword turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with this blog. The search term is - SITCOMTV.COM. Apparently, the first result leads to the post on this very blog describing [...]
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