Benedictine School Toolbar

Image via CrunchBaseI have talked numerous times here about my son and the travails of getting him into his current school situation.  For the past year, he has been a student at the Benedictine School for Exceptional Children.  The school's mission statement is as follows:

The mission of The Benedictine School is to assist individuals with disabilities in becoming as independent or semi-independent as possible; to make wise use of leisure time; and to live and work in a community setting.

I am going to use this space here to do a shameless little plug to benefit the Benedictine Foundation who works on the fundraising to insure that the school and other programs have the money to function in the future.  My wife has recently volunteered to be the regional chair for Anne Arundel and Prince George's Counties in Maryland.  She will be doing work to help plan the annual Spring Benefit next April.

The Foundation recently sent us a newsletter with some ways in which people can do little things to raise money for the school.  One of the easiest ways is for people to download the GoodSearch.com Benedictine School Toolbar and using it for your internet searches.

GoodSearch is a Yahoo powered search engine that works like any other internet search engine.  The major difference is that with every internet search, GoodSearch shares half of its advertising revenue with the charity of your choice, mine being the Benedictine School for Exceptional Children.  On average, each search raises about a penny for your charity.

I know a penny per search does not sound like much, but there is strength in numbers.  The more people using the toolbar the more the money can add up, and every little bit helps.  I have made GoodSearch my default search engine, and I hope you will consider doing the same.  Let me know if you do.  Thanks for considering it.

Tracking Blog Traffic

When I started this blog in August of last year, I decided to use statcounter to keep track of my traffic. It has some nice little features that I would like to look at from time to time. It was fun to look at the map to see where I was getting visitors. When I first started trying to build traffic, I joined a couple different blog advertising communities like entrecard and my personal favorite, Adgitize.

For the longest time, I was getting the lions share of my traffic from entrecard and Adgitize with the occasional visitor coming from search engines.  About a month or so ago, I read a blog post on how much info that particular blogger was getting by adding Google Analytics to their blog.  I added analytics to my blog a little more than a month ago, and it has been very interesting to see what blog posts are generating search engine traffic.

Prior to November, I was probably averaging between 80-100 page views per day.  At the beginning of November, I wrote a post on an Avon Sharper Image Camcorder that my wife gave me for our anniversary.  That post has received nearly 2000 page views from internet search engines. I also found a link to that post on yahoo answers in response to a question on the camcorder.  Somebody else copied and pasted the text of that post in response to the Yahoo answers question.

The next most popular post was one on former biology teacher Tiffany Sheppard turned porn star Leah Lust.  There have been a couple hundred visitors to that post.  I won't go into a lot of detail on some of the other popular posts according to my search engine traffic.  During the month of November, I averaged nearly 200 page loads per day, primarily due to the Avon Camcorder post.  My highest traffic day was a total of 321 pageloads.

That was until yesterday.  I came home yesteray evening and looked at my traffic on statcounter.  It said I had over 1300 page loads today.  I thought that couldn't possibly be correct.  One post that had received a about a dozen hits, the Real Reason Rio Beat Chicago for the Olympics was suddenly getting a ton of traffic.  Upon further investigation, I discovered that  on the Golf Vacation Insider website thay had posted a story called The Real Reason We'll Be Watching Olympic Golf From Rio and Not Chicago which contained a link to my post. 

It is amazing to me to see how one post can all of a sudden start sending visitors your way. 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Trying Out Google Analytics Alerts (blogoscoped.com)
• FeedBurner and Google Analytics: Together at Last (readwriteweb.com)
• How to Write Blog Content For Your Readers (or Why Metrics are So Important) (ariwriter.com)
• How To Get More Traffic To Your Blog (howtospoter.com)