#218 #BlogArch Carnival January: Best Posts

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We’re moving forward with Doug’s Archaeology Carnival and this is my January post. I like to wait until the end of the month so I can wait for everyone else to post. That way I can see what they do that I like, what I don’t like, and take all the good parts and call them my own. Sort of like Apple does with technology. And, like Apple, I make take those ideas and make them iAwesome! Right.

I figured a post that essentially boils down to a popularity contest should start with a little bombastic ego boosting. Feel free to comment your ass off so this can be the post I talk about next year.

Metrics

It can be difficult to measure the “worth” of a particular post. Some posts receive comments, some don’t . Some get a lot of “page views” and some don’t. Then there are the unique views. Those are supposedly the views that count only once per person visit. That means you get counted only once even if you use the same device to check out a post several times in one day. Many bloggers say the unique views are the ones that count. Apparently the bots the troll the internet, such as Google Search, hit sites multiple times which inflates your page view count. I don’t know whether that’s true, and frankly, I don’t care much.

I don’t have any hard numbers on comments, views, or unique views because I switched from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6 last March. When I did that I lost my metrics for Squarespace 5 which accounted for my first 115 or so blog posts. I can tell you, however, which posts were more popular.

By far, my most popular post was the one I made about getting fired for blogging. It happend soon after I started my blog and I’m pretty sure I had over 600 unique views on that post in just a couple days. I keep getting hits on it so I’m sure it’s over several thousand by now.

My most popular series is my “Shovelbums Guide”. It seems that people like this stuff. I named the posts so they are highly searchable as well, so, I think a lot of non-archaeologists end up finding them on Google. The posts were so popular, in fact, that I decided to make an eBook out of them. I happened to have a rough draft of the book on my iPad at the SAAs in Hawai’i last year when I stopped by the Left Coast Press booth. My plan was to ask one of the editors, Caryn Berg, if she thought it would make a good book. I had no intention of publishing it traditionally. She told me that it was a great idea and encouraged me to put in a proposal. I did…the book will be out in April, just in time for a book signing at the SAAs in Austin!

Right now I get between 2500 and 3500 unique hits per month on my blog. It’s pretty steady, even though I don’t blog on a strict schedule. I think I’ve created enough content that I get a lot of hits from people just searching terms on search engines.

I hope to expand on the blog in the future. What I really want is to have a community of CRM bloggers that blog for the DIGTECH CRM Archaeology Blogging Network. That sounds ambitious, I know, but some many people blog so infrequently that they never get exposure. I’d love to see a number of bloggers blogging on here about CRM topics so there is always something good and no one feels pressured by a schedule. What do you think? If you want to joint me and blog on the Random Acts of Science blog, let me know!

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the field!