Saturday, June 21, 2014

Tip for driving traffic to a blog

I have a blog where I post three very interesting videos about the ocean every day. I've got them post-dated so the machine keeps going every day. Of course, I provide curation, in making sure that the selected posts are high quality, etc.

I am using twitterfeed.com to auto-generate tweets announcing each new post.  This twitterfeed engine is running 24/7, making a constant stream of tweets.  

The two graphs below represent hits to the blog, melikestheocean.blogspot.com. The graphs represent hits over the past week and past month, respectively. Note that there is a long flat baseline to the curve: this is a measure of success for the twitter stream.

 I also, Friday morning during breakfast and before retiring, used stumbleupon.com to add about four posts each time. Stumbleupon allows you to "Add a Page" to their stream of pages that users who are interested in a particular topic will see. It is a sort of "captive audience".

The two spikes in the week's curve represent my two sessions of adding pages to stumbleupon.  The month's chart show the success if thus approach compared to that of the steady twitterfeed. There's been a completely steady stream of posts every day, just a big difference in the effectiveness.

Granted, the stumbleupon process is manual and limits you to about ten pages per day, but it is effective.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Why are your Google Adsense "ad impressions" counts lower than your page hits?

I read with respect these earlier defenses of why Adsense impressions could be different from other counter impressions.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/adsense/2frvdOVxz2g
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/55613?hl=en
Neither arguments were entirely satisfying to me. I for example was seeing, in the Blogger Stats for my Ocean Videos site, more than 30 hits PER DAY, whereas Google Adsense only saw 28/WEEK. I was even more puzzled, based on studying the difference in page hits between various posts. I had been sending out tweets for each new posting, and tweets that I knew were more-well-written and/or to more-interesting pages were getting a 3-5X higher number of hits. This seemed to be proof that Adsense was messed up. (I didn't think Google was scamming us but that perhaps there were some laziness or lack of clarity about the policy for "activating" ads).

I noticed that the minimum number of hits was 3 for a tweet. So I tested the "tweet interestingness" theory by using a junk, alternative Twitter account with only 32 followers. I put in four nonsense-letters, followed by a link. It got at least 3 hits. This made me wonder if there were THREE bots scanning twitter, and hitting on every URL posted.

So I did some math. I took the top ten page hits according to the Blogger stats, and subtracted three from every page. The total was 25. Google Adsense's performance report over the same period said I had 28 impressions.

Mystery solved. There are three bots harvesting (my) Twitter-posted URL's. Adsense ignores the bots.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Causal understanding of water displacement by a crow

Fascinating study of crow intelligence. Various experiments where they show they can understand the concept of water displacement.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Do Dogs Make Counterproductive Choices Because They Are Sensitive to Hum...

Researchers try to find a way to get dogs to make the "wrong" choice. Diet tips for dog owners.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Monday, March 10, 2014

Getty Images are now free

Just searched for semiconductor and grabbed first image: