George Allen Miller One Geek's take on all things SciFi

Here we are at month four of this website. The success trend is increasing I can say, happily. On one day I had as many as 50+ unique visitors. A milestone. What brought that sudden change? And it was sudden. I logged into google analytics and nearly fell out of my chair when I saw the hits that I had that day. I had recently posted about the death of John Travolta’s son and thought immediately that it must be ranking high in google searches. It wasn’t. Not terribly so anyway. This site still has a low google page rank so I’m on the first on the search engine top 10 hit list. What did bring my, for one day anyway, success and fame? A linkback.

What is a linkback anyway? Put simply, it’s when another website links back to you. Yes, I know, everyone and their great grandmother knows what that is, but bear with me. I am coming late to this game of blogging after all, even though I’ve been in the tech industry for 10 years +, but that’s another story. At any rate, I posted a note about a green cleaning product. I do so as it was stated the Travolta boy developed a disease due to being exposed to chemicals. It scared me of course, as it should anyone that has children around. So I naturally began looking for “green” and child safe cleaning products. Suffice to say, I found one, and talked about it on the blog post.

What happened next was a bit surprising. I was linked back to by the company of the product. That link back generated a small surge in visitors to this site. I was amazed at how many. It’s not even a popular site in it’s own right but enough so to generate a small bump. And even today, weeks after the initial post, I am getting a steady trickle of visitors.

What does this all mean? To a lot of you I’m sure it means nothing. You already knew this and in truth I did too. Getting a link back to your site from a high ranking site is equal to Internet gold. To me it’s a realization that to get a traffic increase you need to not only post good content but also be part of the blogosphere. Of course, here’s the rub. The blogosphere is a changed landscape from four/five years ago. Gone are the popular people and in their place the popular sites with armies of bloggers. Wired, huffington post, cnn, you name it. Hard to compete when those folks are putting out 30 blogs a day. I work two jobs and can just manage 5-6 big posts a month. Something I’ll have to modify if I want to hit the goal of 1000 hits a day for 30 days. I am beginning to realize it may take a good amount of time before that goal is reached.

Most of this is confirmed by others that have gone done the blogging path long before me. One that gave me a good starting point was a blog post by Steve Pavlina on his website. It’s chocked full of posts on a wide range of topics. Some I agree with and some I don’t. A little too ‘new age’, is that even a thing anymore, for my tastes but mostly good stuff. I’ve done a trackback to it.

So, bottom line, my next step is to get as many sites out there to link back to this one. And of course, to blog more. I need to have a lot of content to generate interest to keep a good following. All basic knowledge i’m sure to the experienced blogger/website owner but somewhat new to me. At least, new in the sense of doing it. Here’s to a successful month!