Postcards From Myself

Yes, the election is tomorrow and that is bringing some real change. I am not talking about which candidate gets elected or if this referendum or that one passes. No, I am talking about search engine traffic. As we have gotten down into the last few days before the election, I noticed that the search terms used to find my site have been subtly altering. A week or two ago the leading phrase that brought people to my site was “free Obama sticker.” This was closely followed in popularity by “free Obama button.” The interesting thing is that I have only written one post on each of those two topics. By the search engine traffic though you would think that free election paraphernalia was all my site is about.

But now the tides are turning. The elections are upon us so there really isn’t time for people to get buttons or stickers. If you haven’t adorned your car yet you are just too late. With that the traffic is starting to return to the real topics of the blog. You know, things like me, cars, religion and anger. Not so sure about that last one, but it is right there in the statistical log.

So the question remains, when everyone is done searching for election freebies and finished fighting over the candidates, what will become of all that time they were spending on the web? Will you go back to spending time with your family and pets? Will you pick up a hobby like knitting or gardening? Or will you move on to the next web craze and start generating searches and traffic for that? Maybe my next big search topic will be “how to get tickets to the inauguration” or “free presidential inauguration passes”. What do you think?

What motivates the traffic to a site? A friend of mine just wrote a blog post and some twitter entries that seemed, on the surface of things, to have increased his traffic suddenly. Does it work that way? Can the simple mention of the bible, pornography, and a porn star in the same article really bump traffic that noticeably? Especially when those subjects are not the normal thrust of your blog?

Jason Bradford, also known as ToneBox, wrote a post about a new movie called “Undersold“. Chrissy Moran stars in the film. She is a former porn star… and a famous and attractive one to boot. Jason says of his friend, “Chrissy’s story has some parallels to the original Bible story and she lives the part daily. That is where Grace comes in. Thankfully Grace is available to all of us no matter the road we’ve been down or are heading.”

So, this article serves a two fold purpose. The first is to get the word out about this movie and one of the great people in it. I think Chrissy Moran’s tale of moving from pornography to religious media is an interesting and compelling one. The second purpose is to try and prove or disprove Jason’s theory that his traffic spiked just because he mentioned the Bible and porno in the same post.

What do you think? Was that the reason his traffic jumped? Or was it a coincidence?