The Poddyland News

Several days ago I was starting to panic that with Hurricane Hanna headed towards South Florida, that the airports would be closed and I wouldn’t be able to head off to New York for the weekend. Now with Hanna fizzling out and having slowed down, it shouldn’t affect us here, so I am pretty sure the flight will leave ok tonight - however…

By the time we are set to come back on Monday afternoon, the monster storm of the season, Hurricane Ike, already a Category 4 while way out in the Atlantic, could either be here or close to being here. I am hoping it misses Florida completely, but if it does hit, it would be nice to be able to get home first. I don’t trust the bedroom windows, and I would prefer to be at home if only to take plenty of video as things blow around - if it does hit us. I would really not want to get stuck in New York with the airports closed - that has to be a really miserable experience.

Nothing much has changed with my lens traffic this week, up slightly, but what has changed is the traffic to one of the jokes on my main web site (So You Think You Had A Bad Day) that has been picked up by Stumbleupon. I had 11,000 visitors to my site yesterday, from 87 Countries, and from all 50 States in the USA. That’s the good news… The bad news - hardly a click on the rotating CJ banner on the main joke page that got hit, and under $3 on Adsense. What a shame - if only I could find a way to capitalize on the traffic…

I’m struggling to keep up with the things that I want to do, just not enough hours in the day unfortunately. For those of you with lenses that I have promised to visit, I have close to 100 lenses marked that I will get around to as soon as I can. The list is growing, but unless I have actually visited a lens, the link isn’t going to go away.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 9
Top 10,000: 4
Lenses: 66

MY TOP 5 LENSES
Poddys Lensography
My Claim To Fame
The Daily Joke - April 2008
The Daily Joke Lensography
My Pet Peeves

My Claim To Fame is back down to #25 today and #2 in Entertainment - oh well I had My Five Minutes Of Fame I suppose at least…

I still have 9 lenses in the Top 2,000 right now, it was 10, and I didn’t create any new ones this weekend - falling behind on the goal I set myself, but I have a tendancy to procrastinate a bit, and when the time gets short I often manage to make a final sprint to the finish…   From having 40 days to create 40 lenses, I am now down to 32 days and 40 lenses, so that means more than 1 a day if I am to make my goal…

The time limit if self imposed, since my girlfriend is coming to stay with me, and once she gets here I know that I will be spending time with her and not working on lenses every evening and weekend.

A couple of my lenses seemed to hold up, but my total traffic took a real dive this weekend.
Not just Squidoo, my other sites as well…

I know it’s the holidays, and the weather was probably nice in various places, so people spent less time online, but I’m wondering if it was just a trend for me, or did anyone else see a drop in visitors as well?

It was wonderful to have My Claim To Fame at #1 in Entertainment and #12 overall, but I wonder what today’s lens ranking updates will bring…

I finally became a Giant Squid - all my hard work paid off, and I’m so pleased to have reached the next level.

Congratulations to everyone who was awarded this status today.

I now have so many new great lenses to visit, so I might take a break from creating any new ones for a day or two, and catch up on maintenance of my existing ones, and very importantly work on building my traffic back up.  While focusing on creating new lenses it sure has dropped.

At least the next level - the 100 Club might be a bit easier.  Only 40 lenses to go and 3 months to do it in.

Enjoy the holiday wekend everyone.
Tony

Even though some traffic might not result in sales or referrals etc, it’s “bad” traffic, it can still serve a purpose, if you can somehow channel it correctly. 

I have a directory (The Poddys Directory) that I created 9 years 10 months ago.  It’s really out of date, needs a complete rewrite and splitting into multiple domains, but it does get alot of traffic and has over 10,000 backlinks to it.

Well, in the past month or so I noticed that certain pages, mostly Jokes (I have almost 2,000 pages of jokes on the site) were getting a lot of traffic according to my site stats.  I have also been getting a lot of traffic in from Stumbleupon, but until this week I never put 2 + 2 together.    Well I finally figured it out last night - I looked in Stumbleupon, and found at least 10 pages of jokes that had over 40 people who liked them on Stumbleupon.   Someone must have added them a few months ago, and other people have also given them a Thumbs Up.    Now there is nothing special about these jokes, they aren’t the greatest jokes, but for some reason they got reviewed on Stumbleupon.  Just yesterday (1st July) alone, one page received 2,789 views!

The bad news is that despite my having updated the page a few weeks ago, practically nobody who visits clicks on the Adsense or CJ ads.  But it’s traffic nevertheless.

So how does this relate to Squidoo?

Well, if I add a link to my Jokes Index lens on Squidoo, and I can encourage 10% of the visitors to my lens, that’s maybe 200 visitors per day.  Then, they might also visit multiple lenses, get hooked, and might even sign up on Squidoo, or give my lenses a Thumbs Up on Stumbleupon too.

It just goes to show that even bad traffic does have it’s uses.  All traffic helps drive the ratings up, in this case Poddys.com is a PR3 rated site, and it’s just a matter of taking that worthless traffic and converting it into something more worthwhile.

I hope to add the links back to Squidoo tonight, and will hopefully see some changes in my lens views tomorrow.

Will keep you posted…

Meantime….  1 lens in the Top 100, and 9 more in the Top 2,000.