Mike Wilson » Progress

Strange website traffic

Mike — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:06:21 +0000

Here’s a chart of all the unique traffic to this blog from December 2011, over the holiday season and into 2012. It’s interesting to see traffic fall off dramatically in the days leading up to Christmas and New Year. Boxing Day was the highest day for visitors and surprisingly around 530 people logged onto www.mikewilson.cc on Christmas Day!* Excluding the lowest and highest point, the range is (max: 650, min: 375) which is almost exactly the same range of visits as I had back in October (but now with more overall unique visitors). The slight upward trend in traffic is encouraging:

*A day is considered +/- 12 hours from GMT. As a lot of traffic comes from the US and Canada, they may be reflected a day earlier or later in the chart.

500 unique visitors per day

Mike — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:06:39 +0000

This might be a nice time to stop for a few minutes to reflect on this site’s website traffic. I honestly don’t care for page loads, it’s unique (and returning) visitors that interest me most. And here you all are over the past month:

I’m currently getting about 500 unique visitors per day (max: 650, min: 370) to this blog… Three and a half years ago, I went from 0 to 100 visitors in six months but the in-between period saw me blogging fairly inconsistently.

In that time, I’ve started a few YouTube channels – mostly for messing around but one particular Philosophy-based channel that I started in 2008 currently has 2,467 subscribers and over 40,000 total upload views. I won’t tell you what the channel name is yet, but it’s a public channel with just six videos on it. Feel free to see if you can find it. I may reveal this channel name in the future.

So, talking about videos, you may have noticed my new YouTube channel; the video version of my blog. It was hard enough choosing a name and recording and editing video takes more time than writing a blog post but it reaches a bigger audience, which is cool.

The lessons I learn making videos will apply directly to my business, as I plan to make video tutorials and marketing videos for all my own products in due course.

Generally the most popular posts are split between how to tutorials, geek reviews and astronomy. Reviews like this and gadgets like this and how to posts like this and how to build your home server get the most traffic.

A brief note on SEO

When I was younger, I used to attend a lot of networking events like those held by Business Networking International and Ecademy. They were generally meetings where local businesses would meet regularly to exchange leads and advice. Each group had it’s own butcher, baker and candlestick maker (yes, I even met a wax worker!) and every single group had it’s own “go to IT person”. Not much room for outsiders then, but I made and earned a few referrals and some sound business contacts during this time. The troubling thing was that I met dozens of “SEO” experts. Every single time they opened their mouths I would cringe. “We can get you to the top of Google”, one would exclaim as if Google was some local hilltop summit that could be reached if only the service provider was gleamed with enough cash.

My retort to them was the same every single time. “If I search Google for “SEO services”, will you be on the front page?”, I would say. The response was invariably ‘no’. But these modern age snake oil salespeople will invariably take your money anyway and provide essentially nothing but placebo in return.

This needs to be an article in its own right, but let me tell you now what the key to doing well in the search engine rankings is:

Don’t be a dick
Produce freely available, genuinely useful, quality content regularly.
Interact with people

Spamming keywords in META tags, jostling things around and producing monthly performance spreadsheets will not translate into conversions. Neither will simply making a video of your products and services and plopping it onto YouTube. “Don’t be a dick” means what it says. You cannot follow an SEO procedure to win views, you cannot “optimise” your online content (past making sure that the markup is clean) and search engines make it their business to match good content to their search. They will find your content if it’s good. And if you want to take advantage of organic search engine optimisation then you’ll need to get out there and interact with your customers online via all the channels they use; forums, social media, video, and so on.

I have never sold SEO services (despite being asked to provide them) and never will. “SEO services” are the technological equivalent of homeopathy, tea leaf reading and snake oil.

Want to know where your site will be listed in Google? Why not try reading tea leaves instead?

If you want to buy SEO services, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I could sell you….

This topic needs it’s own article.

Do you have a blog and how is it doing? Let me know where I can find your blog in the comments below and I’ll add you to my RSS reader…

Strange website traffic

Farnborough Air Show (challenge day 43)

Mike — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:35:32 +0000

Every two years the biggest and most internationally attended aerospace event in the world is hosted at our local airfield which exhibits the latest military and civilian aircraft during a week-long trade show. I’m talking of course about the bi-yearly Farnborough Air Show.

As it happens, my house is one of the original airfield buildings built in the “historic quarter” of the airfield in 1918 by German WW1 prisoners of war. I live less than 300 meters from the tarmac pan of the airstrip and am directly underneath the exhibiting aircraft.

Unfortunately this does mean that any work is particularly difficult since the aircraft are unbelievably loud. I’m working mostly in the early morning and late at night in order to keep on top of my workload. Thanks to my Jawbone’s DARPA noise cancelling technology I can still have telephone conversations but it’s difficult to explain to clients why my office sounds like a bad day on the road to Baghdad. If you’ve tried to talk to me over the phone this week here’s what’s going on;

Monday 14th to Friday 18th July are the trade show days. I could have had tickets for these days, but it’s difficult enough to work around the planes to justify an entire day off to procrastinate at the air show! A recent report by the BBC News at Farnborough makes me wonder how good business actually is. Last year exhibitors grossed over 40 billion USD due to this event. I have doubts that the event will be as successful as there are fewer reports of airline orders in the news this year.

Without further ado, here’s some photos I’ve taken of the 2008 air show so far (with some previously unseen 2006 photos). All photographs are taken from my garden (approximately 2 feet from my office window).

YouTube

I believe that one cannot claim to be a truly innovative business without adopting new media. I have therefore decided to start a YouTube account to publish videos (“how to” videocasts, webcasts, podcasts, etc) in order to educate our users. You can find the Evolved Software Studios account here: http://www.youtube.com/EvolvedSoftware.

I have uploaded a short little video to YouTube to test the system:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p7PKuQVdmk 400 300]

FSX Google Earth Flight Recorder

If you’re a “FSX Google Earth Flight Recorder” user, you might find this screenshot amusing. It’s my own attempt to fly a circuit pattern over EGLF (Farnborough). The line is a little off as I didn’t calibrate before flying and I’m using a friend’s Saitek joystick which works but isn’t particularly precise.

If you are a Microsoft Flight Simulator X enthusiast, please feel free to use the flight recorder. It’s basic but it’s free and there are substantial improvements in the pipeline. FSX SP1 or SP2 is required. Click here to download FSX Google Earth Flight Recorder

For more information on Farnborough 2008, please visit:

Farnborough International Airshow: http://www.farnborough.com
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnborough_Air_Show
Hampshire Police on the Airshow: http://www.hampshire.police.uk/Internet/news/releases/Police+looking+forward+to+Farnborough+International+Airshow.htm
Local Traffic Management (i.e. don’t bother coming near Farnborough unless you want to be stuck in traffic): http://www.rushmoor.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=8224