Digital Archaeology, Halo Effect, As A Tangent…

I mentioned having ran across my old LiveJournal and I pulled all the posts from it and throw ’em on here, plus my old GarageGames posts (I’ve pulled down the MySpace posts too, but they are much more manual to import into Multiply.)  

Google turned 10 this week, so they pulled out the old indexed their searches were based on back in 2001 (the oldest they have on record), and set up an interface to search ’em.  So I did a quick ego search (IE, search for my own name and Midnight Ryder. I don’t bother doing that anymore.  I’ve got Google Alerts these days 😉  Hey look – another blog, this time one I forgot about.  It was hosted at… MidnightRyder.com 🙂

I had forgotten that in 2000, I had started a “Developers Diary” section on the site to chronicle some game development by myself and Randy Glover.  So I extracted the other 20 or so entries.  The Internet Archive happened to have copies of most of it, but not all unfortunately.  Most of the stuff was game development stuff, but there was a small bit of personal life in there too.

Funny thing – I thought my habit of adding song lyrics and quotes started half way through my LiveJournal days, but the format was actually used on the Developers Diaries.  How odd.

So I’ve got 8 years of my history online.  I still can’t decide if that’s really good or bad, but it’s interesting for me to read a ways and see where I was at one time.

So I’ve been doing some expermenting.  I had a theory, and I wondered how well it would work.

Google uses 23, 28, or 31 different mostly hidden criteria to rank websites for searches. Traffic is only one of those variables.  So are META tags, content, domain name relevance, etc., etc, etc.  Lots of stuff.  But traffic is a sort of multiplier – the more of the other things you’ve got right, the more the traffic counts for something.

Enter the Halo Effect.  The halo effect is where when product A sells well, manufacturer of product A also sees an increase in the sales of their other product lines.  Right now, all of my customers have a small ad at the bottom saying “Development and Hosting By Midnight Ryder Technologies” (which also helps with another Google variable, which is links to a particular site.)  As those sites pick up traffic, so does MidnightRyder.Com.  Cool.

So I did some experementing – I set up two new blogs (good God, do I need more blogs? 😉 on various topics.  I did some tricks to pull in traffic to Blog A, which also contained a link to Blog B (which is a subdirectory of MidnightRyder.com, so it counts for the site’s overall traffic.)  The result was 35% of traffic to Blog A also visited Blog B.

Ooooohhhhh… now I think I’ve got something for traffic generation 🙂  

The experement was, btw, does Halo Effect also factor in on traffic / sales for online sites.  Apparently the answer is Yes.  Now the question is how best to capitalize on this.  Thought about ressurecting one of my old books I was working on ages ago and finishing it (actually, I’d have to re-write the whole damned thing, since the original is lost somewhere.)  No idea yet really.

I’ve been considering (and actually wrote a chapter 1 draft, index, and proposal) for a business related book.  It’s part of the reason why I got so excited about pulling together all those old blogs – some if it chronicles a business loss (the most expensive sort of experience ;-)  I was giving serious consideration to writing a book for publication but… well, the only reason why I want a book in the bookstore is ego.  Non-fiction has the advantage of an advance up front, but, it pays jack shit anymore.  Even better, there’s now been multiple books that were published online first, then published in the real world later.  Maybe I should just see if I can pull off using that as a traffic generator instead of re-writing the other book (which is basically a new-agiesh romance novel involving past life regression.  Yeah… something non-fiction tech might be a better idea 🙂

Davis