GeorgiaDragRacing.com Tops 1,000,000 page views in 2004

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 11:56:20 GMT

After working hard this year on building a variety of websites and blogs, it's gratifying to see the work start paying off. My brother, David Dilbeck, owns GeorgiaDragRacing.com and I manage most of the site. For the first time, we had over a million page views, but that's a bit misleading because we moved many of the new photos to Webshots.com and the news is now hosted on his weblog at gdrn.blogspot.com, so the actual number of page views is probably substantially higher. There were over 174,000 unique visitors at JohnDilbeck.com who looked at over 885,000 pages. I'm always surprised by this because this is a site where I experiment to see what works and what doesn't and it has no discernible theme, other than things that tickle this big brain of mine. I was researching search engine placements for some keywords on all the major search engines and I'm happy to see that we continue to get more and more top 10 positions on hundreds of key words and phrases -- so we're obviously doing something right. I've been working the last three months or so to target the keywords "Cherokee County, NC Business" and "Murphy, NC Business" and I'm happy to see these new sites rising in the search engines. It is my goal to help people in my home county promote their organizations and activities more effectively on the Internet by providing either free or inexpensive advertising and promotion venues. Working together, we achieve better results than working alone. I'll prove that in 2005. Because I'm interested in so many things, I'm going to take the parts of JohnDilbeck.com that are theme-related and move, or duplicate, them on smaller themed sites. We'll see if that results in higher traffic and better conversions or whether I'll just waste some time experimenting. Also, to further segment my interests, I've created quite a few new blogs and they will be associated with new websites. I think it will be better in the long run, but it's more work now. Also, while I'm in development mode, I don't get as much real writing and promotion done, but that should improve by March, 2005, giving me all the rest of 2005 to put my promotional plans to work. I'll be putting a full list of all my blogs at http://JohnDilbeck.com/blogs/ and all my websites at http://JohnDilbeck.com/websites/ so I can keep track of all of them! As of yesterday, all of my blogs have been upgraded to make it easy for you to subscribe to the RSS feeds, and I'll be moving more and more towards RSS in the coming months. I appreciate your visiting my site(s) and I hope we're providing information you find interesting and useful. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Happy New Years, y'all.

I've been a busy boy...

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 10:39:01 GMT

As I wrote back on July 20th, I was sick for some time and just wasn't able to get anything done. Boy, did that change! Between then and now, I've been adding to websits and blogs every day. New websites: A Year From Now -- Act on Your Dream!, Dilbeck Communications, and Cherokee County, North Carolina. AYearFromNow.com is hosted on what I think is the best web design, webhosting, and website promotion service available on the planet: Site Build It!. I haven't had the time to really flesh out this site yet, but that is planned for this winter. Are you interested in telling your success story? DilbeckCommunications.com is hosted by Hosting With Us and this is a great webhosting service that offers quality hosting, outstanding support, and good prices. To build this site, I had to learn PHP-Nuke and PHP programming, but now that I know how to do it, the site is coming along nicely. CherokeeCountyNC.com is a portal for residents of, and visitors to, Cherokee County, North Carolina, where I live. I've been thinking about building this site for about a year and after I learned PHP-Nuke it seemed to be just what I wanted to build the site. It, too, is hosted by Hosting With Us. I'll probably be putting most of my efforts into expanding and maintaining this site. With email getting so bogged down by spam and spam filters, I've decided to look into other ways to communicate and I've been looking at options for building blogs and syndicating the content. Now, I know that I've been blogging ever since I started my subdomain on EditThisPage.com and Dave Winer and Userland were on the bleeding edge of blogging, even before it had a name. I've been using Radio Userland for years to build my static sites and to maintain this blog. Over the years, many others have joined in and there are now many tools for blogging. I've been experimenting with Blogger.com and running my feeds through FeedBurner.com to parse the Atom files that Blogger uses, instead of the more-common RSS. I've managed to get syndication working for all my blogs and you can see this at work at JohnDilbeck.com/blogs/. I'm also experimenting with using Blogger to build static pages on CherokeeCountyNC.com, so, a couple of days ago, I changed the settings so that Blogger.com will FTP the Cherokee County, North Carolina Blog to blog.cherokeecountync.com. My thinking is that this will build new static pages on the site, in addition to the dynamic pages built by PHP-Nuke. I believe that the search engines will index the static pages better than the dynamic pages, but I don't know this for sure, and that's why I'm testing it. It's been a wild couple of months, but a lot of progress has been made. Feedburner.com was a great find and I heartily endorse their products. Blogger.com was also a great find and I endorse their product as well. After the hacker problems I had on GeorgiaDragRacing.com, I've been removing almost all the scripts from my static sites and moving towards other services that I can integrate into my sites using FTP and/or javascript. Some work better and some not as well. So far, I'm not sure which I think is the best. Still testing. At this point, I don't have any plans to build any more sites over the next three months, but I have some ideas for new sites this spring. Over the next few weeks, I'll be updating my sites and fleshing out the new ones. You're invited to visit!

John L. Dilbeck: My Interests

GeorgiaDragRacing.com Tops 1,000,000 page views in 2004

I've been a busy boy...