Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

It’s always interesting to look at statistics on the websites. They never fail to turn up surprises.

For one thing, if you strip out ourselves, the majority of the visitors to this site are from America with the UK coming in second place. Or at least that’s what google says. For alexa on the other hand, it’s abot 35% from America and under 5% for the UK which reflects the greater use of the alexa toolbar in America as compared to the UK.

But that’s not too accurate either as the number of readers that arrive via Reuters dwarfs everything else yet isn’t counted by either of the above systems.

In theory, that means that I should be targetting the articles towards the Reuters audience but I’ve not worked out how to do that just yet (suggestions welcome!).

Some of the links that come up on websites are pretty peculiar, don’t you think?

Now, I can understand where they’re coming from when a google ad appears on the blog that’s related to France. After all, I have written a fair amount about France in the past. But hold on: since I’m not writing much about it now, how come google is putting ads on the site that relate to France so often? It shouldn’t be what I wrote about in the past that’s relevant but what’s on the page with the ad right now. Except that often it isn’t.

In a similar vein, the pages being picked up by Reuters are something of a mystery. They’re using some variant of a keyword sieve to select the articles so it’s understandable that my article titled As seen on Reuters is the most “popular”. Similarly those with financial type words in the title have been picked up too, or at least some of them have. Trying to work out what they are looking for will while away many an hour over the Winter I expect.

And then there’s the people who have selected this blog to advertise on. Goodness knows what they are looking for as it’s a complete mystery to me!

I’ve been “hit” yet again by StumbleUpon for a post in the same subject area ie on The France Show.

As before, there are the usual hundreds of hits and diddly in terms of adsense income from them as, on the whole, StumbleUpon people tend to be looking for something fairly specific (which is pretty ironic given the nature of it, of course).

What I keep meaning to do is to use StumbleUpon in some way as I feel sure that there must be some way to keep the arrivals on the site in some way. So far though I’ve not sat down and done more than think a little about it.

Ideas welcome!

I read one time on a high profile blog that they recycle old posts if they can’t think of anything new to write on the basis that a) the content of the old post was still valid and b) nobody would notice because they had so many posts on the blog already.

Whilst I don’t do that myself, it isn’t such a copout as you might think on first reading that. Some of my older posts get quite significant amounts of traffic and bringing them to the attention of new subscribers might not be such a bad idea now and again. There’s also the reference nature of some of them and it would probably be useful to do a tidy-up now and again in some cases that takes account of the various comments made.

What do you think? Is it a valid way of moving the blog onwards or is it just a copout?

The run of peculiar incoming links to this blog continue.

Every time I mention something finance related, a whole raft of blog aggregation blogs pick up the post and republish it. The theory is that they’ll make money on the ads on their site and, of course, they don’t have any nasty work to do once they set up the aggregator.

I write a fair bit on various finance topics so I can understand them monitoring this blog for any appropriate key words and then picking up on them. Or is it simply the category “banking & finance” that they are picking up on? Well, this entry is tagged with that as an experiment so I’ll know better tomorrow.

Other places are a bit more unusual. For example, my piece on The Color Purple was picked up by a literature aggregator and the one on building your own house by a home aggregator. I’m very tempted to play games with them to see just what they’ll pick up 🙂

Still, it does help the incoming links which is all to the good.