Congrats to Tom on winning the 2009 Giencke.netfantasy football league championship, beating yours truly in a pretty (read: painfully) close week 16 game.
Update: Thanks to the Dallas Cowboys getting credited with an additional sack last night, I’m now the league champion, beating Tom by a grand total of 0.12 points. Wow.
What better to do with a backyard full of Minnesota snow, piled a foot high, than to make a 12-foot tall snow Christmas tree. Note the plastic plate star and food coloring ornaments
Snow Christmas Tree I
Snow Christmas Tree II
Update: It’s now 36 degrees here, and the snow Christmas tree is melting, bad…
Snow tree 9:00 PM
Update 2: The snow Christmas tree continues to melt, will it fall??
Snow tree ~10:00 PM
Update 3: The snow Christmas tree has toppled. It’s now 8 feet of melting snow, food coloring, and a plate… :\
Having spent some time going through the web stats (courtesy of Google Analytics) for the WordPress-powered giencke.net blog this weekend, I’m pretty bummed. The facts at hand:
Giencke.net has a bounce rate of ~75%, meaning 3/4 people look at one page, and then go elsewhere.
86% of traffic is direct, meaning only 14% of traffic is new users.
Giencke.net received 14 unique visitors today, 58 unique visitors being the high water mark for the past week (ouch).
Users do spend an average of about 5 minutes on the site, so if they find the archived content, they look at it.
Armed with that sobering knowledge, I’m bound and determined to do better. The site has 6 years of posts, and although it’s mostly fluff, the content still might be interesting/funny. So, here’s my game plan for doubling visitors, halving bounce rate, and adding new eyeballs in 2010 (disclaimer: I work for a search company, but know nothing about SEO outside of what I’ve read on the web, which follows):
Add visible links back to giencke.net content (e.g. RSS), specifically, using the sidebar to add links to recent posts, and a calendar for archived content
Use giencke.net as my own personal twitpic (but in reverse). This entails uploading a pic to the blog, and having some code automatically send out a tweet once the post is published (using wpToGo, for example). This strategy can be applied to advertising more general interest posts as well.
Increase post frequency (from once per month, to at least once per week).
Decreasing the page load time (which may mean moving towards actual self-hosting).
Providing links to high quality, highly-ranked content
Removing the giencke.net wiki, which was serving out porn (WTH) and undoubtedly hurting my page rank.
Adding additional rich content to posts (maps, photos, videos, etc)
Posting more broadly interesting content to blog (howtos, etc).
So far so good with the upgrade to WordPress 2.8x. The beauty of using modern blog software is that it works with other modern software like wpToGo, a free android app that lets me manage this blog from my phone. Lets see if this works, ready, set, send…
