Blog

Archive for "Blog"

A Look at 2007

Posted on December 31, 2007 by Ching under Blog, Web.

Kurt asked me a couple of weeks ago how many visitors we get on our blog. I truly had no idea as I hadn’t been keeping track. I guessed probably only a handful since it’s mostly just family and friends that visit here. Besides that, I’ve been blogging about less controversial (and more and more boring stuff) lately unlike in years past so that doesn’t really do anything to build your readership. Brian says I have no internal censor, but I beg to differ. If I didn’t, I’d be blogging about my usually unpopular opinions about all sorts of things (which I have prudently kept to myself lest I get Dooced, and I wouldn’t wish that fate upon anyone including myself) and making people mad. It’s great for web traffic, but not so great if you actually want to keep your day job.

Anyway, Kurt’s inquiry got me to thinking about our web site statistics. How many people actually come here? Much to my surprise and delight, Life After Marriage actually gets a lot more visitors than I initially thought. Here are some of the more interesting stats:

We had about 400,000 hits in 2007. These hits were by 41,558 unique visitors who visited our blog 108,684 times (this equates to about 2.61 visits per visitor according to Awstats) throughout the year. The visitors looked at nearly 250,000 pages (or 2.25 pages per visit).

Altogether that’s approximately 3,500 unique visitors per month or 115 unique visitors per day. Not too bad, considering I thought I had a following of five: my mom and dad, my in-laws, Cannady Girl, Multitasker Girl, and myself. This is good news for me because it gives me hope on generating ad revenue. The only downside is that these visitors are not sticking around. For 2008, Brian and I will need to figure out a way to not only increase our reach (we are pretty much non-existent and do not matter according to Alexa; then again, very few of us can come even remotely close to the astronomical success of the extremely viral “Elf Yourself” site) but also keep our visitors coming back. Even if we can’t do much about the increasing pages per visit, I’d like to at least see the number of visits per visitor go up. To me that would be a sign of customer retention.

In marketing class this sem we learned the importance of building relationships with your customers (my customers would include you, dear reader). We talked about the Get-Keep-Have (GKH) model and how most people take the “keeping” function for granted. Get + Keep = Have, so without investing resources in the “keeping” function you can’t expect to sustain your customer base. I know this is important. The challenging part is knowing what it is that I’m supposed to do to keep you guys coming back. That part, I don’t know.

I guess Brian and I will just keep at it. We’ll try different things and see how they work. For instance, one of the things I’ve decided to try is a monthly newsletter. If you’re not currently on the distribution list and would like to be on it, just shoot us an email at newsletter@brubakers.us and put SUBSCRIBE in the subject or body of your message. We’ve got a few other things we’d like to try, but we’re just going to roll these things out gradually so as not to overwhelm you all. 🙂 Around this time next year, we can check the results to see if we’ve made any progress.

Before I close, allow me to leave you with some more interesting data about our regular visitors:

Generally based or located in the US

They stay for about 5 minutes on average

62% use IE, 10% use Firefox, 20% some other unidentified, and the other 8% use Netscape (RIP), Opera, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, Lynx, etc.

The visitors who arrive at Life After Marriage through a search engine usually arrive by way of Google (which comes as no surprise to us because Google is our favorite search engine, too)

The top five search phrases that have led visitors to our blog this year are
1. life after marriage (obviously)
2. download
3. crack (don’t ask, I have no idea why people looking for “crack” end up on Life After Marriage; I can assure you, Brian and I are both 100% drug free even to the point of avoiding legal drugs unless we absolutely, positively have to get medicated)
4. bang bang sauce
5. first night after marriage

Incidentally, “myspace swingers” came in 8th on the tally. LOL. I find it funny that people looking for lifestylers end up on our blog when the blog entry (if I’m thinking of the right one) that is triggering the search hit is the one where I wrote about Brian’s anti-MySpace sentiment. To this day, Brian is convinced that the people on MySpace who are looking for “friends” and “activity partners” are really swingers. To this end he has deleted his MySpace account. Although, he is still on Facebook and I’m pretty sure there are swingers on there too. Don’t tell Brian, though. LOL.

Anyway, I hope you found this foray into our web statistics as interesting as I did. Thank you for your continued patronage and support. Please remember to click on the ads now and then. Every penny helps!

Have a safe and happy new year!

No Comments

The First Ever Life After Marriage Newsletter

Posted on December 23, 2007 by Ching under Blog, Life.

Below is a copy of our first monthly email newsletter, borne mostly out of boredom but hopefull some of you will find some use for this. If you did not receive a copy of the newsletter and would like to receive it next time, please email newsletter@brubakers.us with SUBSCRIBE either in the subject line or the body of the message. We will gladly add you to the distribution list. I cannot promise that this will be a regular monthly recurrence because there may be times that I will be too busy to send one, but I can promise a similar newsletter at the end of 2008. 🙂 That’s all I can guarantee for now. Anyway, here is the newsletter that was sent today:

Well, we are snowed in as you can tell from this blog entry. Since I am bored out of my mind, with no homework and no work-work (Thank heavens I’m not on duty this weekend!), I have decided to create a monthly newsletter for our blog. If a monthly newsletter is too frequent for you and you do not really care to receive our updates, please read no further. Respond to this message with REMOVE in the subject and your email address will be promptly removed from this notification list. For the rest of you, welcome!

Since this is the very first email newsletter for our blog I felt a recap of our life together is in order. Before we begin, however, allow me to wish everyone merry Christmas! May you all have a wonderful and blessed holiday season, and a prosperous year ahead!

Though our blog didn’t begin until shortly after our marriage, life with Brian really began in early 2000. That’s when we moved in together. We lived in a two-bedroom townhouse at the northeast side of town with Brian’s brother Kevin. Incidentally, 2000 is also the year my nephew Logan was born.

A year after living together in the townhouse, Brian and I decided to become homeowners. We moved into our house in April 2001. Less than a month later, he proposed. We set the date for August 10, 2002. We chose the date because it is approximately three years into our relationship. You can find other 2001 highlights here.

These are all pre Life After Marriage events. I have been blogging about my life since before the word “blog” entered the vernacular so you could probably still find old journal entries floating around. You can try Google, but here are a couple of places that I was able to find if you’d like to read up:

Chingay – this has stuff that I salvaged from the old Chingay.com web site. Many things are probably lost at this point. I never was any good at doing archives and backups.

No. 2305 – a few things from my old Geocities. There was a period after Chingay.com and Chingay.net and Goldensushi.net when I didn’t have a domain and was using free hosting providers.

I had a XOOM (pre-Chingay.com) and an Angelfire and a Crosswinds and a Scribble and all of those are pretty much gone. Always do your backups!

In 2002, I was laid off from my previous employer. Thankfully, I had another job lined up so I was only without work for a week. Someone up there is looking out for me. 🙂 To this day, I firmly believe that the closing of the Spiegel call center is the best thing to have ever happened in my life (career-wise, anyway). You get comfortable and without even knowing it you’re stuck in a rut.