Perfectly Petersen

Today has been going great here at P-Squared. When I awoke this morning, the traffic on the blog was about normal, if not even a tad lower than sometimes. My day totally changed when I got to work just 30 minutes later and that initial number had increased over 3,000%.

I wondered what was going on, so I checked where people were coming from, and it was Yahoo! search engine traffic, every few seconds… to the same article using the exact same search string! Wondering what was going on, I thought maybe someone was trying a Denial of Service attack and spamming the same search to bring down the server. I checked where the hits were originating, but they were coming from all over the world.

Since they were all directed toward the article on Kevin Richardson, Lion Whisperer from June, I wondered if he went and pulled a Steve Irwin and got himself killed being with the animals he’s so nuts about. Since they were all coming from Yahoo!, I went there to see if there was a headline about his death or something.

This is what I saw: [Read more…]

Blogging can be one of the most rewarding hobbies you can imagine, if you do it right. Successful blogs even become profitable without being annoying, and can vault you into the limelight of the publishing community. If your blog is struggling or you are struggling to come up with content, then maybe it’s just because successful blogging is not intuitive. Today is the first in my 10-Part series on improving your blog and your blogging. Here is the first tip that you either have to discover the hard way or evolve to succeed.

Blog Location

Where does your blog live? Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, LiveJournal? Those are all fine platforms for getting the job done, but surely you’ve noticed that some blogs do not have the extra address information to remember. Have you ever found a good blog before, but not been able to remember whether it was a “.blogspot” or “.wordpress” to get back there? You have to do a search and hope they are indexed. Search engines work fine, and people usually have you in their sidebars for easy clicking, but an easy URL is priceless, too.

“How do you get a cool name?” you ask. That’s the easy part. [Read more…]