Notice, unlike other bloggers, I have no humor category. Why should I? My daily laughs come from simply reviewing the search terms used to arrive at this site.
Here are a few of the best ones recorded this month:
(No, I am not making these up….)
- learn the bible in 24 hours on mp3
- demolishing church sanctuarys (spelled this way)
- Apple + Satan
- keep the internet out of my church
- long tail catholic
- start your own instant bible institute (yes, the words appeared in this order)
I'm just saying these are my readers, my people.
Besides the US Military, including both the navy and the army, I've been visited by NASA, A. C. Nielson (Nielson was my dream career in college), MIT, Cornell & Harvard Universities. From the Screen Actors Guild, Intel and Google to The Christian Broadcasting Network, from Nord-Pas-de-Calais Strazeele, France to The United Republic of Tanzania, they've all stopped by.
I guess just about everyone is interested in the Church and technology.
I won't tell you whose search terms are whose. What's your traffic like?
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Cynthia
What a interesting post. But of course I’m not amazed that you’re visited by Nielsen, NASA and so on, because what you write is most interesting and helps to network. Keep going and don’t be distracted by non-teachable and old fashion people, who still think internet is just a spleen, that goes away sooner or later. Unfortunately loads of them are christians. I wonder how they would react if Jesus would come today once more with a revolutionary teaching like then. And instantly I keep asking myself how I would react.
love greetings from switzerland
Thomas
Thomas, I didn’t know you ever stopped by my site because I thought you got me off RSS. I have just written an article about what you refer to - no not the internet being a spleen (is this a Swiss German phrase?) but why Christians should capitalize on the iGeneration. I’ll forward it to you.
Over 70% of my traffic is from search engines. It’s sad in one way, because I’d love to have a dedicated and loyal audience that addictively returns for more, more, more! According to Quantcast, my visitors are mostly college-educated caucasian male daddies between the ages of 25-54 who make less than $30K a year. Don’t ask me how Quantcast knows these things. It’s magic. (see: http://quantcast.com/tatumweb.com )
I looked at my logfile. Over the last 20 hours my site has fielded almost 10 hits an hour (194 visits) from people usng Google to search for stuff.
According to the visits, the most popular pages for search results are a post on Carlton Pearson’s heresy, a post on making Firefox faster, my Jesus Camp critique, and an article against sponsored torture.
But the queries are all over the veldt.
Now the thing is, these search queries actually drove traffic to my site. The searcher looked for the terms, scrolled through the list, and actually clicked through to see what I had to say. That’s at once frightening and exciting. For example, an article I wrote on greed that got published in CTLibrary generated a visitor looking for information on:
Maybe the person doing the following search found some help. I hope so:
That was a good, relevant search returning a relevant result.
But my article against torture, by virtue of the terms I used, also attracted some possibly disturbed individuals. Such as the two individuals looking for:
People do seem to be endlessly curious about Carlton Pearson, but surprisingly they’re also interested in:
Generally, I can guess the article that generated a hit just by looking at the keywords. For example, I know exactly which article this poor, bored, searcher landed on:
But I had no idea what this searcher could have possibly found of on ny blog:
Turns out it was Carlton Pearson.
Yeah. I get that.
Rich
BlogRodent
erm i don’t know, i’ve never figured out to find out any more than the simple stats that come with typepad, which do hits but that’s about it.
I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing - good cos it tells me that people are reading at least
oh and i owe you that email reply
You present yourself as somewhat naive when it comes to net-savvyness, but Paul, due to the number of blogs you maintain, you cannot convince me you are not an Omnivore.
Those are very funny! I sent people to your blog from mine today. Thanks for all you are doing to serve so many!
and you’re the commedian!
I actually came to this blog by searching “long-tail catholic ministry” on Google. I was trying to see if anyone else out there was thinking about how the “long tail” phenomenon of Web 2.0 influences ministry in the internet age.
I am an adult minister of my parish and I find that, when it comes to adult education, i find more success in attracting many small, specialized study/prayer groups than I can find interest in “Big Ticket” events and classes (aside from biggies like sacramental prep.) Seems like the overall effort/benefit ratio is biggest when aiming at the Long Tail than aiming at the mainstream. Anyone else out there have this experience?
Cody - looks like you’ve been blogging since the dawn of the web
and thus no surprise you’re searching “Long Tail” ideas.
You might want to check out Glenn Frazier who put up a podcast on his reflections of the book and it’s implications for ministry. I think it’s called Church & the Long Tail. Googleable for sure. Thanks for stopping by.