August 24, 2010

Are You Out There? Can You Hear Me?

I’ve learned a lot as a Dog Blogger. For one thing, I’ve learned that every day I can check my “stats” to find out how many people have visited our site. While at first the number was around 50 or so, recently the number has skyrocketed. I mean last Friday there 1,015 “hits” on our site and only 46 of them were what are called “uniques” meaning that 46 new people visited the website. In other words, 969 people have visited us before!

Whoa! How can that be? No one ever leaves us a comment on our comment page (well, rarely) and we only have 11 full-time clients. So as I was working today, I asked myself – Who on earth are these people?

I asked our clients today. “Hey Ollie, who do you think is looking at pictures of you and me play?”

“People are looking at me? Where? When? I don’t see them?”

“They’re not here,” I told him, “They’re on the website.”

“There are people on the website? I thought we were just there?” he said.

I tried, really, I tried to make him understand, but my buddy Ollie is all about being a good boy, posing for the photos, so he can earn a treat. He’s such a good dog , but he doesn’t know much about blogging.

So then I had Gretchen ask Rosie. Rosie response?

“Gee, I bet they’re people who like Boxers,” she said, “Or maybe they like flowers because whenever you take me walking, you take as many photos of flowers as you do of me.”

Gretchen’s response, “That’s because you’re as beautiful as a flower, Rosie!”

“And named for one, too!” she smiled.

I was hesitant to ask Gemma because sometimes Gemma never really hears me. She’s too busy scouting out who or what she can pester, but today, on our walk with Zoe, she said, “They’re Irish people who want to look at an Irish dog!”

“Wait just a minute,” Zoe interrupted. “I’m not Irish. I’m Bernese.”

“Where is Bernese?” Gemma snorted.

“I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s close to Ireland,” said Zoe.

“Jeez, you guys,” I said, “Bernese dogs are originally from Switzerland. They a really old breed, sometimes known as “yellow cheeks” and I don’t think that’s why people are clicking on our site.”

“Could be, you never know,” said Zoe.

“But I think they’re Irish not Switzerlandish,” said Gemma.

“That’s Swiss,” I corrected her.

“Swiss? Do you have lisp or something?” she asked.

Oh my.

Sometimes my job is a lot harder than it looks!

As you can see, I wasn’t getting much help and while Saber is young and I didn’t have much hope that he’d know a lot about the internet, we were all out of clients for the day so I thought I’d give it a go.

“So Saber…” but before I even got the question out, he was off fetching a ball in the lake. Boy, that guy likes to swim, but even more, he likes to fetch the ball that I like to fetch, which means that he waits to jump on me as I swim in.

Hard to ask questions when you’re swimming, but on the way home, I asked. “Saber, do you know much about the internet?”

“Sure do, Rubin. What do you want to know?”

I told him about the “uniques” and if it really means that 969 people are revisiting our site. He said, “Well, it could be, but it might also be that people are searching for something like a dog photograph, of which you have many, or perhaps are searching for a certain thing, like a Saber, and they click on the website because those are all things you can find there — Sabers and dog pictures.”

“But are they always the same person?” I wondered?

“Could be, but more than likely they access the site via the same link like Facebook or one of the other websites where your site is mentioned,” he explained. “Still, that’s a lot of hits. You should be proud!”

Wow, what a wealth of information Saber was! Gretchen told me that’s because he’s young and the youth of today are far more technologically savvy then the older generation.

Does that mean I’m older? Wait a minute!

Regardless, if you are visiting the site and you like what you see, drop us a comment. We’d love to hear from you!

Until tomorrow,

Rubin

Leave a Reply