Living Savannah

Quick thoughts on a year of blogging; a few changes for 2012

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I’ve learned a lot about online consumption of news and information in this year of blogging.

A few quick notes on the past year:

Most used search terms to find this blog from Jan. 1st to Dec. 30th, 2011:

  • bill dawers    349
  • corey smith chattanooga    244
  • kenimer mound   192
  • www.billdawers.com    188
  • bill dawers blog    135
  • savannah music festival 2012   111
  • westboro baptist church savannah   95
  • scad graduation concert  2011   81
  • cold war kids scad   80
  • savannah movie trailer   76
  • cold war kids savannah   59
  • williams sonoma savannah ga 54
  • westboro baptist church savannah ga   49
  • wayne cauthen    43
  • scad cold war kids   41
  • mayan site in georgia   40
  • maya site in georgia  39

Why would someone search for www.billdawers.com rather than just type it into the address bar? The mysteries of the human mind and of internet use . . .

Regular readers are probably shocked to see “corey smith chattanooga” so high on the list, and I’ll bet the overwhelming majority of regular visitors have no idea what “kenimer mound” is.

Months ago, I posted a brief blurb on a Saturday morning about Corey Smith getting shut down at Track 29 in Chattanooga as he began his encore “Fuck the Po-Po”. The local press was slow to pick up on it, so people searching for information about the incident landed on my blog. In retrospect, I should have known that post would attract internet searchers in large numbers. People crave basic information and increasingly are going online to get it. Duh.

Kenimer Mound is the site in north Georgia that just last week was mentioned in spurious claims that the Maya migrated there after their civilization collapsed.

If Wayne Cauthen rings a bell, he was one of the four finalists for the city manager position in Savannah. He was easily qualified for the position and I’m still puzzled by how little attention the public gave him.

Search traffic has increased dramatically over the course of the year. As I write this early on the afternoon of Dec. 30th, exactly half of the site’s hits today have come from search engines.

Most viewed posts:

Most clicked link:

ARCHAEOLOGICAL TESTING AT THE KENIMER SITE, 9WH68   126

Most referrals from other sites:

  • Facebook   20,747
  • Twitter   1,017
  • That’s Just Peachy   560

Total page views:

  • 71,524

A few changes for 2012

I haven’t made any headway in finding other writers for the site, although that remains a possibility.

I’m going to start putting more videos up (mostly embeds from YouTube and Vimeo), and if I don’t have a lot of commentary, I’ll make those viewable directly from the homepage. I’ve got a couple there now. I’m not sure why I’m not already doing that.

I use Google Adsense ads, and have also been using the Google Affiliate Network. Those GAN ads are in the sidebar (mostly 125 x 125 banners). I get a percentage of sales generated by those GAN ads, but they have performed very  poorly. So I’m now selling ads for those spaces directly. Cindy Rents Savannah took over one of those slots a few weeks ago, and a handful of other local businesses will likely appear soon. I realize that these ads might create apparent or actual conflicts of interest; I’ll do my best to address concerns that come up. If you’re interested in those ad slots, go here.

I don’t plan to let this blog become overly obsessed with national politics, but I’ll inevitably be writing about the national elections in 2012.

A thank you

I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to those of you who have been reading my blog in its first year. It has been for me a much more interesting and productive outlet than simply posting to Facebook, and it has afforded me the chance to cover a wide range of topics that I cannot cover in my Savannah Morning News columns (which are linked in an automatically updated feed in the sidebar).

My best wishes for 2012.