Blog stats for 2017

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

Blog stats for 2016

Well, folks, I broke 100,000 views in 2016, something I never dreamed of when I started this blog at the tail end of 2009. This little blog got 108,999 total views in 2016. In 2015, I got 51,449, so views more than doubled last year.

screen-shot-2017-01-04-at-9-33-44-pmIt started in January. Total views jumped to over 10,000 per month. The main driver seems to have been a single post, How to drink water with lemon and preserve your tooth enamel. That post got 52,433 views in 2016, and only 10,715 in 2015. First published in January 2014, it only got 209 views that entire year.

I’m guessing that starting in January 2015, people were drinking lemon water, felt something different going on in their mouths, and they got concerned, Googled, and found my post. I wish I knew more about why that post went viral. Did WordPress feature it? Did it get reblogged elsewhere? Who linked to it? It’s a mystery to me.

So 2016 turned out to be the year of preserving tooth enamel. In response to the interest, and after a visit to my dentist, I wrote another post, Rebuilding tooth enamel after drinking water with lemon, in June 2016 that got 2,148 views last year. That was the only top post I actually wrote in 2016.

There was also a lot of interest in the posts Recovering from a virus, recovering from adrenal exhaustion, My experience with brainwave optimization, and Healing bruised, strained toes, which round out the top 5 posts for 2016.

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Continue reading

End-of-year blog stats for 2012

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!

Behind the scenes of a blog: search terms that have brought readers here :-)

Behind the scenes of this WordPress.com blog, I can view my site’s statistics. One of my favorite things to check on is the list of search terms that people have entered into a search engine that somehow got them to this blog.

Besides the usual suspects like yoga, 4 hour body, trauma releasing exercises, buddha brain, spartan carousel, flu, and tibetan monks austin, here are some others over the past three months that have been amusing:

having a good axle-hole (?)

zafu brown (any relationship to Encyclopedia Brown?)

mcrae says dukkha means (okay, William, what’s up with that?)

yoaching yoga coaching

dont fall asleep in trauma (okay, i wont)

4 hour body can you eat refried beans everyday (love it!)

realigious ked wearing people (it’s a cult!)

There are some that are inspiring. I plan to do my own Google searches using these search terms. Some people know what’s important!

synesthesia and gamma waves (I’ll have what she’s having)

playful joy

shaking medicine groups