Who’s Sending the Most Traffic to Your Blog?

About this topic Brian Gardner has sent me an e-mail containing the article that I have quoted below.

I’ve written more blog posts in the past 2 weeks than I have in the past year – well, not really, but it’s pretty close if you can believe that.
So it’s natural that I’ve spent time inside my Google Analytics account, which was obvious since I recently posted a graph that shows Google Chrome will overtake Mozilla Firefox.


 If You Dig Deep Enough, You Might Find Something

While I was in my analytics account, I decided that I would check out one more thing – traffic referrals to my website. To my surprise, here is what I found:

I don’t get a ton of traffic here on my personal blog – no where close to the amount of traffic that < a href=http://www.studiopress.com/>StudioPress gets – but I found something very interesting, nonetheless.
Prior to the launch of Google Plus, the #1 referrer to my site was easily Google (the search engine). Even though Analytics considers that organic traffic, I place that in the generic “how people get to my site” group.
Let’s Throw Out Google Search Traffic and Focus on Social Media
As I had mentioned above, I’ve published 4 blog posts over the past two weeks, and treated them all the same in regards to sharing them on my social media outlets – Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
In other words, when I published a post, I’d link to it through all of the aforementioned social media accounts just to see what would happen.
It’s quite obvious from the traffic numbers in the analytics chart above, that Google Plus was the #1 leading referral source to my blog, followed up by Twitter and Facebook.

Drawing Some (Very Basic) Conclusions From This Data

I don’t think that the results from this experiment are groundbreaking, nor do I think they would apply to all bloggers and websites.
But what I can say, is that it shows that Google Plus is going to definitely going to be a part of my daily social media routine. From sharing links to general comments and conversation with my tech friends online, I will certainly make my appearance there.
So how about you? Who sends the most traffic to your blog?
You can either talk about other websites, or preferably talk about social media sources.

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Let's Cook Together With Lim Yixin

After watching my blogger friend Lim Yixin’s pictures , I remember when I was a student abroad (in Europe) many years ago. Our student hostel provided a kitchen where we could cook our meals everyday . The students from Asia were the most widely used the kitchen . So, every time we finished college, then we rushed into the kitchen,. The simple dish most easily made was omelette. Its main ingredient was egg. Having beaten in a bowl, the egg was then fried until cooked as shown in the pictures made by Lim Yixin . Other foods cooked depent on their respective nations.There were many kind of foods such as fried rice, fried noodles, fried chicken, fried tofu, etc.The most horrendous was the fried salted fish. Wow…It smells begging for mercy ! It’s very stinging, so it could make people cough. Many foreign friends were often angry because of  the fried salted fishes’ smell.

Another delicious food was curry (from India), sukiyaki and teriyaki (from Japan), kebabs (from Turkey), chicken “opor” ( food with coconut milk from Indonesia), various noodles food (from China) and many others.

If you have any recipes from your country, please don,t hesitate to write them as comments , Really appreciate your add.

Enjoy !.

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How I Lost Millions and Lived to Tell About It

Yesterday my senior blogger friend Brian Gardner has sent me a story about his great experience in online business. I think his story is very useful to share for other bloggers. Therefore I have quoted it below.

Every season on America’s Funniest Videos you’ll see a clip of some poor fellow getting punk’d by his friends or family.
He’s the guy seen scratching some lottery ticket and thinks he just won a lot of money. You may see him start running around with his arms flailing, kissing anything in sight. While he thinks he hit the mother load, they were just playing a trick on him.

Back in 2009, that was me.
Not quite the same situation, and most definitely not being punk’d. This was real.
When a Deal Falls Through
I’m sure most of you don’t know this, but nearly two years ago I came THIS close to selling StudioPress, a company that I founded which develops premium WordPress themes.
Nearly everyday you can read on Mashable about startups that are bought by larger companies or investor groups. On that site, more than likely those deals which are announced fall within the millions of dollars – and some of them even into the billions.
I was less than two weeks away from having a story like that of my own – not to say that Mashable would have covered it, but StudioPress was a few hundred hours from changing hands. Two weeks from me and my family having a pay day that many dream about.
The saying goes, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, right?
So What Happened?
I won’t go into all of the (gory) details, but ultimately things didn’t work out. It was disappointing because I was really excited about the opportunity to stay onboard with them and continue to run StudioPress.
I had plans to make it grow, to strategize and to see how far I could take it with greater resources at my disposal.
I visited their office twice, and got to know some of the employees – whom I really liked and knew I’d work well with.
Everything during the due diligence round checked out – but the bottom line was the investors weren’t completely onboard. And I respected that, even though it was really difficult to hear.

Living to Tell About It
You might be asking why I am sharing this somewhat personal situation – and the answer is simple. I’m an entrepreneur, as many of you who are.
We share commonalities with things that are somewhat trivial (like web browsers), and also with things that affect us on a much higher level.
When things don’t go our way, we have the option to sulk and let it (negatively) affect how we do life. The other option, which is usually much more difficult, is to identify the silver lining in a could that feels pretty dark.
Even though the multi-million dollar deal fell through, I learned a lot – from the process itself, and also finding fortune in what I still had. An opportunity to take that business which I had built to places it had never been.

The Silver Lining in My Dark Cloud
Less than a year after the deal fell through, I made a business decision that I believe was the silver lining in the dark cloud. 9 months ago I proudly came together with 4 incredible people to form Copyblogger Media.
When one door closes (or in my case slams), at some point another will open.
Of course from time to time I think about what could have been – but looking back it might have been the best thing for me as an individual and StudioPress as a company.
Within the past 9 months, StudioPress sales have doubled. In March we launched Premise – a tool for building landing pages. Scribe SEO saw a great update in version 3.0.
I’ve become the Chief Product Office at Copyblogger Media.
The Genesis Framework is now being used on over 300,00 sites.
Somehow I think you get the picture, that I don’t regret what happened – even if it meant not having that big pay day. I learned a very important lesson, and I’m quite content.
When the deal fell through, another door opened…

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Fukushima cover on its way

Tepco plans to complete the construction of a cover over the stricken Fukushima Daiichi unit 1 by the end of September, according to a progress report submitted to the Japanese nuclear safety agency. Meanwhile, recent analysis suggests most of the fuel in the unit's storage pool is undamaged.

A cover is being installed over the unit 1 reactor building, damaged by a hydrogen explosion on 12 March, as a temporary measure to reduce the release of radioactive materials to the atmosphere as well as to prevent the ingress of rainwater. Preparatory work, such as levelling the ground, began in mid-May. Crawler cranes are to be used in the installation process to minimize the exposure dose of workers and shorten the work period.

According to a report on the construction plan submitted by Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) on 24 June, on-site construction work is now underway and is scheduled for completion by the end of September, although the plans include a contingency margin to the end of November.

The cover will be able to accommodate an accumulated snow load of 30 centimetres, wind speeds of up to 25 metres per second, and a horizontal seismic load of 0.2, according to Tepco. All the wall panels will have a flameproof coating, and the structure will have a filtered ventilation system capable of handling 10,000 cubic metres per hour through six lines, including two backup lines. The cover structure will also be fitted with internal monitoring cameras, radiation and hydrogen detectors, thermometers and a pipe for water injection.
Nuclide analysis of water from the used fuel pool at unit 1 suggests that most of the fuel in the pool is sound, Tepco reports. The analysis of 300 millilitres of water from the pool on 22 June showed higher activity levels than would be expected under normal conditions, but this is assumed to arise from contamination by radioactive materials from rubble, dust and incoming contaminated water.

Trial operations of a system to treat contaminated water at Fukushima are continuing despite an interruption for a caesium absorption unit to be exchanged. According to Tepco, 2489 tonnes of contaminated water had been treated as of 24 June.

(Source : World Nuclear News, edition of 27 June 2011)

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