I thought this was kind of interesting, even though it really may seem obvious. This blog is only 2 months, 2 weeks, and 2 days old. I’m not looking to make waves with this blog, but I do ultimately want a lot of traffic. That’s pretty much the whole reason behind a blog, right?
I’ve been getting around 30 unique hits per day so far with some peeks and valleys here and there. I don’t think that’s too terribly bad considering I haven’t done much to promote it and I haven’t been too active within the blog community lately.
The other day, I posted a huge rant about people trying to sue Hannah Montana and/or Ticketmaster because I was so ticked off about it. Well, in an honest attempt to stir up some traffic, I titled it “Hanna Montana is Freakin HOT“. Then I went on to say how “hot” her ticket sales were and how everyone was apparently dying to get them. Well, it somehow got onto totalfark.com, which you need a paid membership site, so I couldn’t see any details or comments and I couldn’t comment myself.
Anyway, I got about 400 unique hits that day. I swear, I was checking my site every 10 minutes… just watching the hits pile up. 400 to me is huge. The entire day landed me exactly 0 comments! 400 hits, no comments. No Adsense clicks, no affiliate clicks, no browsing, nothing. I would imagine that every comment there was, was posted on totalfark, which I didn’t even “qualify” to become a member so I could see. That sucked.
I had a post queued up to talk about that particular fact. Then my wife and daughter came back from the Hannah Montana concert with some pictures and a few video clips. I thought to myself, wouldn’t I be a saint if I posted them on youtube, for all those people that didn’t get to go… I also thought, wouldn’t it be great to get some more traffic? Maybe this time, they’ll post a few comments. In fact, I’ll post a link on my youtube description on each of the 3 videos that there is “more to see” at my site. Surely I’d get some conversation going… I still claim complete ignorance, but I really thought I’d get some adults (parents) to comment and either agree with me or bash me.
Well, I got 500 unique hits the first day and about 1000 total. My youtube clips got a total of about 20,000 views and counting. There were well over 100 comments total. 20 or so subscriptions (which are completely pointless considering my video clips will never have anything to do with Hannah again). My site however, got exactly one comment… actually, it was a trackback. NO comments, no clicks, no discussion, nothing! The youtube comments do me no good, neither do the subscriptions. My naive ass just stirred up a metric shitload of kiddie traffic. Kiddie, being teens, but relatively speaking, they’re kiddies.
The experiment failed on one hand… even though I got more traffic last week than I did the prior 2 months, I made 1 penny from the deal on Adsense… and got no comments and clicks other than the big red X in the upper-right corner of the window. On the other hand, I guess I did learn quite a bit. It was interesting to see the traffic and the viral reaction to my youtube clips. The bottom line to me was that the teen market and even pre-teen were markets that I never thought about. Granted, there’s no reason for me to cater to them on this site, but it brings up a few interesting ideas in my mind for other potential sites and other potential ways to make a buck.