Geek-speak, meta-tags, and more

First, and this is from my media advisers, please click the "post-to-facebook" button at the bottom of this post if you like this blog. Do this every time you read something you'd like to share with your vast hoard of connections. Seriously - if you can "LIKE" something as inconsequential as a brand of potato-chips, then you can "re-post to facebook" a thought from Derek Maul once in a while!

Okay, so here's the big news of the day. Look out world, Derek Maul is now doing twitter (@derekmaul 60 characters and counting)...!

However, and before any of you go "Chortle-chortle, what a dumb thing for him to do", let me offer this short but important disclaimer. I'm entering the world of tweets on the advice of my media-handlers.

No, this is not like a Tiger Woods tweet. No need for redemptive social networking from me, thank you very much. This is more along the lines of, "Derek, we know you're not anywhere close to being a geek... But we're geeks, and we're here to tell you that anything you do that even vaguely ups your public profile is, like, better than a pocket-protector so far as we're concerned."

Well, that's not exactly what they said, but you get the picture. Two followers on twitter will about double my public profile right there so we know what we're working with. In fact, you could be the "follower" who puts me over the top!

GeekSpeak: All in all it was an interesting session with the technology folk down at Family First and All Pro Dad. I learned concepts such as "meta-tag" and "search engine optimization." What I'm supposed to do is to load my writing with meta-tags in order to push my articles up the Google search list results.

Or, as I explained to a friend with a liberal arts mind like mine, "Imagine we're following people through the grocery store, watching what they put in their cart and also looking over their shoulder to look at their shopping list. We're then better prepared to make our product fit their search, and we can run ahead and put our stuff on the shelf before they even finish looking."

All Pro Dad alone, and this is mind boggling, is now generating around 120,000 unique hits per month. That means 120,000 different people are logging on. If you don't understand what a "unique hit" is, think church attendance. At my church, between 350 and 400 people show up every Sunday, for a total monthly attendance of around 1,500. Of that 1,500, probably 1,000 were the 250 people who showed up every single week (250 X 4 = 1,000). So, if you only count someone one time during the month - no matter how often they come, the best estimate of the number of different people who showed up at least once during any given month is probably between 500 and 600.... or, 600 unique hits.

That All Pro Dad statistic of 120,000 represents approximately a 100% increase in traffic over the past year. That's huge. So I asked my number-crunching friends how they accounted for the growth. They said they have identified probably eight factors that have helped, but that the "10-Ways" billboard lists are always number one on their list.

That makes me feel very good. Because over 50% of the "10-Ways" lists were penned by yours truly. Click on the one below my sign off, it'll give you a good idea of what I'm up to, and why I'm excited and motivated about my work more than ever before.

Grace and Peace - DEREK

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