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2018 blog stats

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Every year since 2010, I’ve written a post summarizing the year on this blog. Here are the highlights for 2018.

My posts from years past about healing my injured sacroiliac joints have gotten a lot of comments in 2018 from people who are also suffering, and that has brought the most gratification this year, to know that documenting my healing journey offers hope to others.

To summarize that journey, I saw many practitioners in various bodywork modalities for a couple of decades before finding one who truly understood what it would take to heal the injury. I followed her advice, and it worked. My final post, Sacroiliac joint healed!, published in 2017, includes links to all my previous posts on the topic.

In 2018, I had 94,239 visitors and 127,235 views. This is down a bit from 2017, even though I wrote more posts in 2018. I’m attributing the downturn in visitors and views to social media burnout.

Social media has been a fun new toy — and more people are seeking balance in their lives. I’m actually fine with it, as I’m seeking balance too. Writing fewer posts but having them be more germane to how we can live better lives works for me. Plus, I’m a bodyworker and wellness advocate by trade. Less text neck, eye strain, forward head posture, and sitting are better for your health. I want you to be healthy!

I wrote 32 blog posts in 2018, totaling 16,319 words, averaging 510 words per post, a bit shorter than I typically have written.

Of the posts I wrote this year, these have gotten the most views (listed newest to oldest):

The most-read post in 2018 was one first posted back in January 2014, How to drink water with lemon and preserve your tooth enamel. It’s gotten the most comments of any post I’ve ever written. Believe it or not, almost 5 years after it was first published, 40,960 people read that post in 2018. I hope they/you are preserving their/your tooth enamel!

At the end of 2018, I have 292 followers on WordPress, 92 on email, and 605 on social media. Thank you!

The most popular day and hour for reading my blog is Sunday at 2 pm.

And now (drum roll), where are readers from? Well, it looks like this:

  • all of North America except Greenland
  • all of South America except for one tiny country north of Brazil (French Guiana)
  • all of Europe except Svalbard islands
  • all of Asia except Iran, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan
  • most of Africa except Western Sahara, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia
  • I imagine there are some tiny island nations that don’t appear on the map with no readers

As always, it astounds me how connected the world is now because of the internet.

One of my intentions for 2019 is to improve my writing. I’d like to write a monthly post but have each be more interesting, compelling, and shareable.

Thank you so much for reading!

Blog stats for 2017

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Happy 2018! I’m back from a few days in the stunning big-sky big-earth desert/mountain landscape of Big Bend National Park, with a brief boat-and-burro-ride into Boquillas, Mexico.

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Nature sure helps put my monkey-mind concerns into perspective. Hikes, hot springs, camp food, company, solitude, and nourishing views, views, views.

On the return trip of about 9 hours, I drove into a spectacular cold front featuring a wall of low clouds made of freezing mist that I could see miles ahead of me. Continue reading →

Buycott: new app for smart phones lets you vote with your dollars!

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Avoid Koch Industries Campaign

Avoid Koch Industries Campaign

A new free smart phone app is quickly gaining popularity. Last week Forbes.com, the business magazine, profiled it in this article, New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto, and More By Scanning Your Shopping Cart. (Well done, Forbes! I didn’t know you had it in you.)

The article has already gotten about 440,000 shares on Facebook, which probably qualifies it as being pretty close to viral. I downloaded the app, but apparently they were overwhelmed with new users and still working on some functionality after the Forbes article.

Today it appears to be working fine. I took it for a test ride at my local H-E-B.

To me, this app represents a capitalist democracy functioning at its finest. Companies are of course very sensitive to sales, and at the same time many are making unprecedented use of corporate dollars to influence the governmental representatives that we voted into office to do their bidding. They’ve bought our politicians, and the Supreme Court has given its blessing.

So who’s watching out for us?

We the people can vote with our money and influence those companies to act more in our interests. Yes, we not only get to vote in the voting booth, but now this app makes it really easy to vote with our pocketbooks at the point of sale, which is probably way more effective than just voting in a booth in these days of Citizens v. United.

Here’s how to use it:

  1. Download the free app. When I first went to the website, it said the Android app is coming soon. The iPhone app is available in the Apple app store. Did I mention it’s free?
  2. Open the app and set yourself up with an account, or you can log in with Facebook if you have an account there.
  3. Note the three buttons at the bottom: Activity, Scan, and Campaigns. Click the Campaigns button to view and join campaigns. Next, select a category. For example, I selected Health.

  4. Joining A Campaign

    Joining A Campaign

    A list of health-related campaigns appear. I selected the campaign “YES to Organic+NonGMO — NO to Monsanto+GMOs” (see photo at right). I can now view information about this campaign, lists of companies and brands aligned with this campaign’s purpose, and Buycott members who’ve joined this campaign. I simply clicked a button to join this campaign. Click the Back button to continue to select the categories and campaigns you want to support. Now you’re ready to shop!

  5. When you are in a store considering a purchase and want to know if the money you pay will support or oppose your values, open the app and click Scan. Hover the phone’s camera over the product’s bar code so that you can view the entire code on the screen. Hold the phone steady for 2-3 seconds until a message says the bar code is loading.
  6. Once the company info appears, you can see whether it supports the campaigns you support. You can view company info, its family tree, and the campaigns it supports, and make a decision about purchasing the product that’s in line with your values.
  7. To scan another item, click Close and do steps 5 and 6 again.

If you want to see a history of your actions (campaigns joined, items scanned, etc.), click Activity (see photo below).

My Activity

My Activity

That’s pretty much it!

So, just for fun, next time you go to the store, go to the soda aisle and scan a bottle of Coke. Then take a look at its family tree. The screenshot below shows the companies/brands owned by Coca-Cola. You have to do a lot of horizontal scrolling to see them all. Then click Campaigns to see where the company stands in relation to your values.

End-of-year blog stats for 2012

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I’m winding up my third year of blogging, getting ready to move into the fourth year, so it’s a good time to summarize.

View and visitor data

In 2012, my blog was viewed over 48,000 times, averaging 134 views per day. That’s up from 23,000 total and 63 average in 2011. Readership continues to grow. Thank you.

I had my best day ever, 580 views by 206 visitors, on Monday, December 10. That was far above average, and I still don’t know what made it different. I’m curious and happy!

(FYI, each page/post viewed per day per device counts as one view. WordPress just started tracking visitors this month, so I won’t have meaningful data on visitors for awhile.)

Most popular posts of 2012

  1. Home page/archives (the blog was my home page for most of the year)
  2. Update on my Spartan trailer
  3. Trauma releasing exercises
  4. Tattoo art on yogis
  5. The starfish story: making a difference
  6. The Well Ashiatsu and Massage (my new home page as of the latter part of this year)
  7. Each moment, life as it is, the only teacher: quotes from Joko Beck
  8. How do you get your energy back after having the flu?
  9. The left brain right brain crossover
  10. What you need to know about standing desks

Many of these posts appeared before 2012, but The starfish story and The Well Ashiatsu and Massage were new. Other new popular posts in 2012 included The heart’s energy field, Breaking a habit: change the cue and reward first, and the routine will follow, and The 12 Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening. Posts on current yoga controversies (injuries and scandals) got quite a few views as well.

Where views came from

blog views by county, 2012

blog views by county, 2012

Since Feb. 25, 2012, when WordPress began tracking where views came from, over 27,000 views have come from the U.S., followed by Canada and the UK with about 2,500 each. Australia, India, Germany, South Africa, Ireland, Netherlands, and New Zealand round out the top 10 countries. Hi, y’all!

I had no views at all in 2012 from Greenland, Bolivia, Cuba, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Somalia, several west and central African nations. and a few very tiny ones.

Most popular search terms

Almost 30,000 views came through people using search engines, mostly Google. (This is why tagging is so important.) These were the most popular search terms:

  1. yoga tattoos
  2. spartan trailer
  3. trauma release exercises
  4. spartan carousel
  5. starfish story
  6. yoga tattoo
  7. spartan trailers
  8. spartan carousel for sale
  9. standing desk height calculator
  10. glenn black yoga

Other search terms that got viewers here included:

  • sitting unhealthy
  • jobs that are not sedentary
  • constructive things to do
  • 100 naked people
  • tantric broad

Surprisingly, several search terms used the Russian and Turkish alphabets. I have no idea what the English equivalents are.  I had 125 views from Turkey and 70 from the Russian Federation, so I goess they found something of interest. 

Clicks and ads and earnings

If you enter Amazon through links on this blog and make a purchase, I get a small percentage of whatever you buy, through a program called Amazon Associates. Amazon got 973 clicks from this blog in 2012.

From those clicks and subsequent sales, I earned all of $110 in 2012.

Don’t ask how many hours I put into this website. I don’t track my time, but I’m sure it averaged at least a couple of hours per week, and often double that. $110 for 104 hours (52 x 2) works out to about $1 per hour. Hmmm.

I have yet to be paid a cent for allowing ads on the blog. I’ve earned $54.37 since February 2012, when I began allowing ads, but the minimum payout is $100, so I’m still waiting for a deposit.  Frankly, I’m not sure advertising is worth the aesthetic drag and distraction, and I worry that some company whose values I disagree with (like Monsanto) will advertise.

If that happens, please let me know as soon as possible, so I can quit taking ads.

Blogging is a labor of love for me. It would be nice to make more money at it (with integrity, of course). I consider writing projects from time to time that could bring in  income, but so far I haven’t followed through. I believe that could change!

Other data

I end 2012 with:

  • over 75,000 views total
  • 313 followers (156 at the end of 2011)
  • 727 total posts
  • 2,250 tags
  • 576 comments (including my replies to commenters)

It’s been a good year. Thank you for reading me!

50,000 views! Thanks, readers!

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Sometime during the night, when July 3 was turning into July 4, my blog passed 50,000 views. I like milestones, and this one is pretty major! The fireworks tonight will have a little extra meaning for me because I am celebrating.

Who knew, when I started? It’s like relationships. No matter what promises are made, you don’t know if they’ll last until they do. There have been times when I’ve thought I had nothing to write about, and then something came up that I wanted to share. Early on, I had some connectivity problems and didn’t post for a couple of weeks, but since then, it’s rare for me not to post at least twice a week.

Since my last milestone posting in April, I’ve met with a psychic who told me that I’ve been a writer for many lifetimes, and that in one lifetime, I was a man who wrote with a quill pen.

I hope what I wrote was interesting, well-written, and effective. (Don’t you know I wish I knew the name of that previous self so I could look up his/my writings???)

Here’s a graphic from my WordPress dashboard displaying the views by month:

You can see how slow it was for the first year, 2010, when I averaged 11 views a day. It started taking off in 2011, and 2012 has been great, so far averaging 125 views per day.

I guess this really tells what it takes to be successful at blogging—that it takes time and consistent posting to build a following. The success is on my terms, too.

The most popular post of all time is an update on my Spartan trailer, which is off the wellness/aliveness topic. Search engines bring viewers interested in Spartan trailers here. Some may even stick around for the wellness stuff!

I wish I knew which posts were most popular with subscribers and regular readers, whom I believe are more interested in trauma recovery, health, wellness, and wisdom.

And okay, I am an eclectic blogger.

Subscribers and readers, what would you like to see more of? 

WordPress began showing views by country in February 2012. Here’s an image of the top 10 countries for viewers since then:

You can see that over 10,000 of the 50,000 views have occurred since late February, by Americans. That’s pretty amazing!

The bottom of the list is equally impressive. It’s amazing to realize that I’ve had viewers from distant countries like Liberia, Fiji, the Faroe Islands, New Caledonia, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and Zimbabwe.

I don’t even know where New Caledonia is. Wikipedia tells me it’s a French archipelago east of Australia in Melanesia.

The Faroe Islands are Danish Islands halfway between Norway and Iceland.

Hello and welcome. The Internet really does make the world smaller.

There is no master plan for this blog, except to post what interests me. As I build my massage practice and continue to investigate the keys to wellness, including new discoveries about the ways to be healthy, I’m sure I will blog more on those topics.

I love hearing from you via comments, likes, and shares.

Thank you, readers, for stopping by here, and I especially thank those of you devoted enough to subscribe. You really make it worth my while.