This is my place.

The big news here is growth in visitors and views. 2020 almost doubled from last year. The last few months averaged well over a hundred views a day.

I am amazed at all the countries I’ve had views from. The most interesting are the countries I’ve only had one view from. Places like Bhutan, Sudan, Rwanda, and Tonga. Viewers also come from places like Iran, Yemen, and mainland China where my posts are probably not at all welcome. Of course, the West is my main source and the good ole USA accounts for most of that. But there are a fair number of folks from the Philippines and India checking it out.

I know I have several followers from India. It would be really cool if I could build up a following in say, Taiwan or Ireland. Wonder how I could do that?

I have thought about it. I see a lot of people doing what I call “proactive reciprocal marketing” but not doing it well. The classic is when you see someone has liked your last 8 posts and the timestamps show they all happened within the same one minute span. I suppose they could have read all my posts and then liked them all at once. This just feels unlikely.

What I’m going to try is to find bloggers in those areas who have the same kind of interests as I do. I’ll read a few of their most recent posts. If I “like” a post it will be because I actually like it. And if I like one a whole lot, I will leave a thoughtful comment of moderate length and substantive enough that they’ll know I really read the post. That may just hook them well enough that they come over to my side and read some of my stuff. If we end up following each other, that is how I might generate genuine followers and not just rack up the follower count.

Quality over quantity! But, maybe I can only say that because I am not monetized.

The “referrers” stat is one I look at closely. Not that I can do a whole lot about it but I still think it might be useful in some way.

Looking at search engines, compared to Google everything else is noise. About all you can do for search engines is to work on your SEO strategy. You can further break those down by clicking on that down arrow. Search engines will tell what local engine you were searched from, i.e. Google.ca or Google.co.jp.

Here’s a question. How would I, an English using American, get myself featured more prominently on Google Japan?

Some of the referrers are websites that people came to yours from. These referrals are precious. Such a referral is usually accompanied by a genuine interest in your blog and often by positive things said on the referring site. Click on them and you’ll get a list of each separate blog post that got you a referral.

So thank you Nick & Lins for all your links. Thank you Naturist Philosopher. Thank you Naturist Blog. Thank you Crow’s World of Anime. Thank you Autism Forums. Thank you Yuri Reviews. Thank you Mistress of Yaoi. And everyone else who has helped my little blog grow.

One more thing. Twitter got me 442 hits. I do very little in twitter. Not that many people follow me. With the few people I follow, I still find myself being flooded by more tweets than I can read. If I were more active, I’m sure I could get a lot more. I suppose I should delve into Instagram and Pinterest. Flog my blog on Facebook and MeWe. Reddit got me 130 hits even though I almost never go there. I am concerned that if I utilized all the social media out there to its max, that activity alone would monopolize my time. I do need time for family, to watch interesting anime, and to have all the small scale adventures I blog about.

There are limits to how hard I’ll work on a blog. The real world is calling.

Which posts are the most popular? That’s a fun question because of all the different meanings I can give to “popular.” Over the long haul, nudie posts have the most staying power. My most popular post for all time is Get Naked, Go Hiking. More likes and more views than any other. Number two is the anime review of Yosuga no Sora. Even though they are years old, there are still days when one of these two posts will snag the most views for a single day.

These are followed by Bare to Breakers 2018 NSFW which seems to have simply disappeared from my blog (Ok. I just now fixed that.) and then by my review of the anime, The Garden of Words. These just happen to be the most popular for 2020 as well as for the entire history of my blog.

I don’t think my search terms are nearly as interesting as Irina’s.

“gendo ikari who could play him”

When I first saw this, I thought about who might be a good actor for Gendo in a live-action version of Evangelion. But then my mind started to wander. More entertaining interpretations could arise from using different definitions of “play.” One could play him like moving a chess piece or to lay down a card in a game or you could play him like an angler would play a fish on a line. Or a con artist might play a mark.

Given the nature of Evangelion, I rather like this alternate approach. He would be an extremely hard target.

“i wash my face in the bathwater my sister just used anime”

Kind of an amusing approach to finding an anime where one has forgotten the title but not the important content.

“if you mess with me, you mess with my grandpa, and you don’t want to mess with him”

I know the post that this brought up. But it sounds like a quote from a movie or TV show I’ve heard and can’t quite pin down.

“nudists on smutty.com”

I have no idea how looking for “nudists on smutty.com” pointed them to my site. Smutty.com is a porn site that collects pictures that other people find on the internet and “contribute.” The “nudists” section is mostly ordinary pictures of attractive naked females – as opposed to females engaging in various kinds of sex. I’ve never referenced that website. I didn’t even know it existed before I saw this search result and checked it out. I am baffled how I could turn up in a search of that type.

As an aside, very few searches included the terms “nudist” and “naturist.” This was one of a couple that did. Almost all such searches were looking for “nude” or “naked,” with a few references to “bare.”

“garden of words pedo?”

This is an odd search. It showed up a half dozen times with different misspellings of the word “pedophilia.” Was it one person desperately trying to find a topic or was the topic just really popular? I don’t think I provided what they were looking for. Sadly for the searcher, “The Garden of Words” does not contain anything even remotely related to pedophilia.

song “rebel with a kickstand”

This is great! Someone else misunderstood the lyrics exactly like I did. I remember when I first searched for this phrase to identify the song it came from and came up with a bunch of biker movies for my results. It is good to know I helped someone.

Back story: When I first heard this song and fell in love with it, I thought it was a woman singing. But when the lyric “rebel with a kickstand” hit me, I thought that either she’s a biker babe or trans. Since there’s no other biker content I had to assume the singer was trans which made it extra double super incredible cool. (Not that there isn’t anything super about a biker babe singing about staying young while you grow old.) Then I saw the video by the informationally named artist, “Portugal. The Man“

“bay to breakers 2020 nude erections”

Sorry to disappoint but I didn’t include those images. I have them. One guy was flaunting it. (I was told he’d consumed a fair amount of Viagara just for the purpose.) Another guy had one but I don’t think he was aware of it. (I know what that’s like.) The “Bare” to Breakers has all kinds. Either way, while I personally don’t find it at all offensive I’m just not so sure about my readers. The passing textiles just thought it was funny.

Just what kind of clothing would an erection wear anyhow? A sock puppet?

“łeba wydmy”

Took me a while to figure this out. According to Google, “wydmy” translates from Polish to “dunes.” in English. “Leba” translates as “head.” “Leba wymdy” becomes “the head of the dunes.”

As it turns out, Leba is a city in the Gdansk region of Poland that is famous for its coastal sand dunes. I have no idea how this search came up with my blog.

That it for 2020. It has been an interesting year. As in the “ancient Chinese curse” kind of interesting. 2021 is also looking interesting, at least until a vaccine is widely disseminated. All we can do is go to ground and wait this thing out. Take care everyone.