40 years ago Robert Zajonc did a very interesting experiment.

Volunteers are asked to watch a screen as a series of Chinese symbols are displayed.  None of the participant understand the symbols, to them they are nothing more then a bunch of intersecting lines and squiggles.  After each character is displayed the viewer states whether they like the symbol or not.

Of course, this is a very subjective thing.  Each person either likes it or does not like it.  If asked why they liked or disliked the Chinese symbol they usually say either that they did not know or they gave a reason like – it just looks nice.

To the participants it is an easy task.  Look at the symbol and state whether they like it or not.  They suspect nothing sinister.

What they do not realize is that milliseconds before each Chinese symbol is displayed on the screen there is another symbol flashed on the screen so quickly that they do not concisely see it.  Before a Chinese symbol appears on the screen the experimenters flashed one of two recognizable symbols – either a smiley face or a sad face.  They flashed it so fast that none of the participants reported seeing it.  But it was there.

The result of the experiment is that the participants where statistically more likely to like a Chinese symbol that had a smiley face preceding it.  Flash a smiley face, and the Chinese symbol will be liked.  Flash a sad face and the symbol will not be liked.

The revealing thing is that people can be primed to like or dislike something.  And the best part is that they do not know that it is happening.  Knowing this you can influence a persons opinion without them knowing you are doing it.  They  like something, but they do not know why.  There must be a way to harness this power and apply it to a website…

How To Apply The Smiley Face’s Mind Control Powers To Your Website?

Obviously the best way to apply this knowledge is to have a smiley face flash milliseconds before your website appears.  It would be so quick that the visitor would not notice it, but their subconscious would notice it.  They would be primed to like your website.  When your website does appear, without knowing why, they will like it.  Before reading a single line, before knowing what your website is about, they will be in a state of mind to like your website.  You will have them right where you want them – puppet on a string.

But unfortunately this cannot be done.  Not because it would be wrong, but because the technology is not there.  Currently it is not possible to have a image flash fast enough in a browser without the visitor noticing something suspicions.  The browsers might flicker, or depending on the connection speed the visitor would notice a lag in page loading speed.  Browsers are not dependable enough for this to work properly and reliably.  There will be some error, some glitch, some unintended loading pause and sooner or later you will be found out  – and that would be embarrassing.

So what can be done?  It is a waste not to use this knowledge to your advantage. 

The experiment teaches two things: people can be primed without knowing it and people are more likely to like something if they see a smiley face. 

Technology prevents you from flashing a happy face before they enter your website, but there is nothing preventing you from having a happy face somewhere on your website.  The effect will be the same.  Incorporate it into your logo, or simply have it sitting somewhere inconspicuously on your website banner.  

The visitor will notice it visually, but they will be unaware of its subversive subconscious powers.  They simply see it as a happy face graphic, without realizing they are being primed.  The visitor does not know that the smiley face has special mind powers -  the innocent smile sitting on the top-corner of the website reaching into their soul and forcing them to like the website.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, There is a HOW TO in the Post

For the last couple of days there has been a spike in traffic.  Retribution has come at last.  Finally the recognition I deserve.  After almost 9 months of work and waiting, after over 400 hours at the keyboard, the website is taking off.

That was my initial reaction after seeing the sudden increase in traffic.  But after some digging around in the website stats I discovered that it was not my hard work paying off – it was somebody else’s.

Clue 1 – Referral Websites That Do Not Link Back To This Website

The first thing I checked after seeing the spike in traffic was who it was coming from.  Who is sending me all the traffic.  Is it Google, is it a guest post I did, was this website featured on some blog, was this website submitted on a social network like reddit.com? 

I quickly discovered that it was none of these.  Using awstats I noticed that the top three websites sending this website traffic are website’s that I have never heard of before.  I checked them out and discovered three things:

1. They had nothing to do with my niche (make money online)
2. They were not in English (mostly Russian)
3. They did not have a backlink to this website

Number 1 and 2 are strange.  But 3 just does not make sense.  How are these website sending me traffic without having a link to this website?  Something is not right.

On seeing this the initial smile on my face slowly flattened out. 

Clue 2 – Traffic was not increasing in Google Analytic

Every morning I check the website traffic via two sources: awstats and Google Analytics.  Awstats is a server side analytic tracker.  Every time a request is made of the server then awstats make a note of it.  It could be a human viewing a webpage, or a search engine spider indexing the site, or a hacker trying to gain access.  Server side means that every request the server is asked to do gets recorded.  It is the most detailed and accurate measure of your website’s activity.

Google Analytic on the other hand is a client side analytic tracker.  It is a small java script sitting on every webpage that gets activated only when a browser views the webpage.  Client side analytics is a good measure of how many people are viewing the webpage – every time a browser reads the webpage the Google Analytic script is activated and the page view is recorded.

There is a major drawback to client side analytic tracker: the visitor must permit the running of java script in their browser.  If the visitors browser has java script disabled then the Google Analytic script cannot run and the visitor is not recorded.  For this reason the server side analytic traffic stats will always be higher then the Google Analytic stats.  That is why every morning I check both.  Usually they report the same number of visitor but sometimes Google Analytic is a little lower.

But with the recent traffic spike the numbers being reported where completely different.  Awstats was reporting 218 visitors while Google Analytic was reporting only 54.  Why the large discrepancy? 

The edges of my mouth became heavy and I could no longer hold them up.

Clue 3 – Pages That I Did Not Create Had The Most Amount Of Page Views

Again looking at the awstats I noticed that there where some strange looking pages that where quickly rising in the number of page views.  The odd thing is that they where pages that I did not create.  Pages like:

• howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com/SpryAssets/_vti_logs/CitiBank/CitiBank/citibankupdate/images/newimages/secure/bankofamerica/signon.php
• howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com/library/_notes/www.bankofamericaonline.com/www.bankofamerica.com/Onlinesecuritydepartment/bofa-update/session.cgi/cgi-bin2/Signin.Do/

CitiBank?  Bank of America?  What the hell is going on?  What are banking pages doing on my webpages?  I clicked on the links and here is what came up:

Request for banking information.  This is not good.

On seeing this my face was completely deformed.  Eyebrows pointing downwards and wrinkles on my forehead.

This Website Was Making Money By Collecting Banking Information

My website had been hacked.  A not so nice person uploaded and ran a script on my webspace.  This website was sending out requests to people asking them to update their banking information.  Those that dutifully complied sent their banking information to the not so nice person.

Based on the stats the request to update banking information was viewed around 500 times.  Unfortunately there is no way for me to tell how many people actually filled out the form.  Or how much money was stolen from those that did.  But to those that did fill it out, and had money stolen, I apologize for the small part this website played.

The funny thing  is that thanks to my low traffic numbers I was able to catch the problem quickly.  Only because my traffic doubled from the usual 70 visitors a day to over 150 visitors a day I able to notice the hack.  If this website was more successful and had 1000’s of visitors a day then it would of taken a lot longer (if ever) for me to notice.  An extra 50 visitors a day would a been a small unnoticed blimp on the radar.

How This Website Makes Money?  By stealing peoples banking information.  This website makes money – but unfortunately in this case I was not be the one receiving it.

How the Hack Was Removed

Although I liked the high traffic numbers I felt the right thing to do was to remove the hack.  I contacted my web host and told them about the problem.  They quickly disabled the infected folders on my website and deleted the hacked files.  Now if somebody tries to access the banking page’s  URL’s they get a 404 error instead of a banking information update page. 

Then I did an IP block for the suspicious websites that where sending traffic to my site.  So now if they try to send traffic to this website they get an access denied message. 

Now my website is back to its old self again.  Traffic is down to where it should be and the website is back to making a couple of dollars a day that go into my pocket. 

I admit, there were casualties – some people lost a lot of money.  But I am glad it happened.  I got the taste for success.  I got to feel, even if for just a brief few days, the excitement of this website finally taking off.  And I learned something – how to make my website is a little more secure.  I benefit from somebody else’s loss – that does not happen to often.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used

Making comments on blogs is claimed to be a great way to increase traffic to your site. Here is how it is suppose to work:

1. You write a quality comment on a blog post.
2. Other visitors reading the post notice your comment. They find your comment interesting and click on your URL to find out more about you and your site.

What is a Quality Comment

Writing comments to increase traffic to your website only works if people click on your URL. People will only click on your URL if they are interested in what you have written. I always thought this point obvious. But reading some of the comments on blogs it seams that some people do not understand this fundamental point.

For example, this is a comment left by someone on a blog I frequently visit:

You hit the nail on the head on every point. All of those points are just as important as each other.

This person has no idea what commenting is for. Why did he take the time to leave this comment? Besides the obvious ambiguity of the comment (are the points important or not?), this comment does not provide any value. Who cares that the commentor likes the post. Who cares that commentor thinks all the points are equally (not)important. The only reason anybody might click on the commentor’s URL is to find out if their site is as pointless as the comment.

The commentor read somewhere that to increase traffic to your site you should leave comments on blogs. And like a 4 year kid who climbs into the drying machine because his big brother tells him to, the commentor goes and writes comments on blogs without thinking about why. A commenting zombie with only one thought running round and round his head, “Must make comments, must make comments, must make comments”

What this commentor has failed to understand is that for the comment to have any effect on his blog’s traffic the comment must entice people to click on the URL. It is the whole point of commenting. A comment is a sales pitch. You are selling yourself. You are saying, “Look how smart, interesting, funny I am. Visit my blog for more of the same.”

A quality comment is one in which you make the reader interested enough that they click on your URL. So before clicking the submit comment button ask yourself – why am I climbing into the drying machine.

Longer Comments are Higher Quality Comments

By making a single simple assumption we can test whether quality comments increase traffic to a site. The assumption is that longer comments are higher quality then short comments. Assumptions are usually a bad thing but in this case I think it is a safe assumption because the more text a comment has the better chance there is value in it. Short comments consist mostly of the “Great post, will do on my site.” type – no quality comments. Longer comments have something to say so they tend to be more interesting – quality comments.

Do Commentors of Successful Sites Leave Longer Comments

To determine whether quality comments lead to more traffic to a site I did the following:

1. Going back 1 years on Problogger’s archived posts, I took the URL’s of the commentors for the month of July 2008.
2. The retrieved URL’s were run through the website webtraffic24 which estimated the amount of traffic that the URL currently receives.
3. For each URL the average amount of characters per comment was calculated.

By doing the above I can determine whether there is any correlation between a commentor’s comment size and the success of their site 1 year later. What I expected to find is that successful sites have a higher average comment size then failing sites. In other words, currently successful sites should have on average larger comments (quality comments) then failing sites.

The results:

	Comment Length
Total Average Comment Size:	384
Average Comment Size of Dead Blogs (Less then 200 visitors a day):	363 (table)
Average Comment Size of Successful Blogs (More then 2000 visitors a day):	412 (table)

Commentors of currently successful site had only 13% larger comments then commentors on currently failing sites.

I was a little surprised by the small difference in comment size. I expected the comments of the successful sites to be at least 50% bigger then the failed sites. I really do not know how to explain it. There are two conclusion one can make from the result:

1. Larger comments are not higher quality comments
2. Making quality comments does not have any real effect on the success of your site.

My hunch is that number 2 is the real case. I have never had good results by leaving comments. Even when my comment is one of the top 5 comments on a high traffic blog like Problogger, the number of visitors I receive is around 10 – and of course my comments are high quality. 10 visitors does not make a site a success. I guess if you made a comment every single day on 20 high volume site then the numbers become significant. But if you are making that many comments you will be left with little time to work on your own site.

The lesson: If you need to tell the world that you think that a post is great and that you will apply it to your site then go ahead. Nobody cares – but if you feel the need to say it then say it. On the other hand if you spend 45 minutes making a high quality comment that makes people laugh, cry and nod their head in agreement then write it – but do not expect it to make your website a success.

A suggestion for a comment on this post: what percent of your traffic comes from leaving comments?

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, What YOU Expect vs Reality, What YOU Should Do

This blog just had its 6 months anniversary. There was no celebration at this house. Nothing to be happy about. After 6 months there are still only a few visitors, there is little revenue and the future looks as blurry as it did the day I started. Actually, it was better when I started – 6 months ago I had more enthusiasm.

I use to search the internet for tips and advice on how to make my blog a success. Every new piece of information was consumed with gusto. At the beginning I thought all I have to do was this and that, and then my blog will be a success. The reasoning was that my blog is not a success because I still have not done this and that, but once I do it then the blog will succeed – my traffic stats will roll like the number of McDonald’s hamburgers sold.

Like most people I got my advice from Problogger. Darren Rowse, the owner of Problogger knows what he is talking about – he is one of the top blogging gurus. His indisputable credential is his very successful blog. Almost everyday he gives out advice on how to improve a blog. And it is good advice, it has to be, he is a success.

Readers of problogger are all looking to improve their blogs. This is evident by the most common type of comments readers leave:

• Great advice! I will have to implement that on my blog.
• I have been meaning to do this to my blog. Now I know it needs to be done today!
• A perfect post. Thanks Darren. I will do this to my blog ASAP.
• You are a constant source of motivation. My blog has been doing poorly but I can see that with a little work I can make it better.
• Good point, going to do this now! Thanks Darren.

Can you feel the enthusiasm! The readers are learning from the master. They are doing something wrong on their blog, they learn from Problogger, and then claim they will fix it.

You would expect that with all these people constantly improving their blogs there would be a lot more successful blogs. If everybody is doing what Problogger is suggesting then success should be everywhere. But it is not. Blogs are continuing to fail – just like mine.

After 6 months this blog has made very little progress. It still hovers around 50 visitors a day and daily revenue is still measured in pennies. The only aspect that has increased is the number of hours that I have put into it. But that is just me – how do I know that other blogs are also failing? Specifically, how do I know that Problogger’s readers are failing even though they are aware of and claim to use problogger’s advice on their blogs?

In my previous post I showed how in 3 years 71% of blogs are dead. To recap, this is how the number was derived:

1. Going back 3 years on problogger’s archived posts, I took the URL’s of the commentors for the month of January 2006.
2. The retrieved URL’s were run through the website webtraffic24 which estimated the amount of traffic that the URL currently receives.
3. It turned out that 3 years after making a comment on problogger 71% of blogs still had less then 200 visitors a day. (for details of how the data is gathered please see post: What are the odds that your blog will fail?)

The data clearly showed that Problogger’s commentors are not doing to well after three years.

Does Commenting on Problogger Improve Your Blog

Now I want to use the same approach to determine whether Problogger commentors are really improving their blogs. They state, ‘great! I will take your advice and do that to my blog’. But are they really doing it? Are they improving their blog?

There is a easy way to test whether reading Problogger’s advice improves blogs. Here is the approach:

1. Gather URLs from current Problogger commentors and find out how many blogs are failing. These are people who just got the advice and still have not had time to implement.
2. Go back 6 months in Probloggers posts and gather the commentors URLs and find out how many blogs are failing now. These are people who got the advice 6 months ago and have had 6 months to implement the advice.
3. Go back 1 year in Probloggers posts and gather the commentors URLs and find out how many blogs are failing now. These are people that got the advice 1 year ago – plenty of time to implement and reap the results.

Using this method we should expect to see that the older blogs have a lower failure rate then the newer blogs. For example, a commentor on problogger 1 year ago stating, ‘Awesome post Darren, I will do that to my blog right now.’, should be better off today then a commentor you just a few days ago stated, ‘Great advice, I will do that today’. People who took Probloggers advice a year ago should be reaping the benefits today.

Here are the results:

Visitors who read and commented on Probloggers advice	% blogs failing today (less then 200 visitors a day)
1 month ago	55.00% (536 out of 976 URLs)
6 months ago	57.00% (502 out of 877 URLs)
12 months ago	56.00% (485 out of 866 URLs)

 

No difference. A Problogger commentor who 6 months ago, or 1 year ago, learned some great piece of advice from Problogger has no statistical advantage over someone who became aware of it yesterday and is about to apply it to his/her blog.

2 Possible Reasons Why Problogger’s Advice Does Not Improve Your Blog

There are two ways to interpret the data:

1. Problogger adds no value to bloggers. Implementing advice does not increase your chance of having a successful blog. The advice might of worked for Problogger but it will not make your blog better. You might aswell not read problogger’s advice because it will not help you.
2. The advice is good and it works but people do not apply Problogger’s advice to their blogs. They state, ‘great post, will do to my blog’, but they don’t. They tell the world that they will follow Problogger’s advice but in the end they just leave their blog as is. Not implemetening the advice leads to failure.

Unfortunately there is no way to tell which of these two is reality. Problogger is a success and Darren knows what he is doing – but maybe his advice applies only to him. Just because it works for him does not mean it will work for you. Bill Gates can tell you everything he did to become a success, but it does not mean that simply doing what he did will lead to success. It might even be that by doing what he is doing lowers your chance of success because everybody is trying to do it.

The more likely situation is number 2. It is so much easier for commentors to write, ‘Will do’, then to actually do it. They say they will, but they don’t. This should not be a surprise to anybody since this is normal human behavior. After leaving a motivational seminar the audience will be chanting and clapping with enthusiasm – ‘yes I can, yes I will, I will do it’. They even continue to chant this in the car during the drive home. But as soon as they arrive home their chant changes to, ‘where is dinner, where are my slippers, where is the remote’.

Misery Loves Company – My 6 month Anniversary Present

6 months ago I also made a comment on Problogger so I am part of the statistics. After 6 months my blog belongs in the failure category. But there is some good news: According to webtraffic24 this blog gets 64 visitors a day (which is pretty close to the actual value). I checked how many people that commented on problogger 6 months ago have less traffic then me. It turns out that 39% of the commentors are currently doing worse them me. I am not at the bottom and there are a lot of failures around me. It is not a great present but I will take it – it is the only good news I got.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, What YOU Expect vs Reality

Ever since I created this blog I have wanted to know what my odds of success are. Out of 100 people that have a blog how many fail? After searching around the best I could find was 99%. You see it everywhere, 99% of all blogs fail.

This is an interesting number but the problem is that there is never any data to back it up. The number comes from nowhere. Maybe it is just intuition – the people that have been around a long time notice that most bloggers come and then they go. To them it seems like 99% of them disappear.

Intuition gone wrong is the cause of the current 50% divorce rate – intuition is not good enough. I would like to see some data to back up the claim. I can find out the chances of killing myself skiing, so why can’t I find out the chances of success with a blog?

Blogs Die Without A Trace

There is a good reason why there are no actual statistics for becoming a successful blogger. The problem is that blogs do not leave a body when they die – they disappear. They are like aliens in a computer game – once you shoot them with your photon laser they disappear. No trace remains, no clues that they were ever there, no dead bodies to count.

To find out my chances of dieing on a ski hill is easy. All I have to do is to go to the ski hill parking lot and wait till the end of the day. On a piece of paper I draw a line down the center. On the left side top part I write ‘Alive’ and on the top right side I write ‘Dead’. At the end of the day I make a mark on the left side of the page for everybody that leaves the hill with their skies and for the skiers that leave in a body bag I make a mark on the right side. By doing this everyday for the entire season I will have nice set of statistics. By adding up the marks on the left side and the the marks on the right side I can easily figure out how many people out of a hundred die skiing.

Unfortunately this kind of data gathering is hard to do with blogs. There is no way to count dead blogs. Looking around the internet there are only two types of blogs: successful blogs and those trying to be successful. The blogs that have died leave no trace, so there is no way to count them, there is no way to gather marks for the right side of the paper. All you see are the living blogs.

Problogger to the Rescue

Problogger is a very popular and successful blog. The owner, Darren Rowse, has been doling out advice on how to write a successful blog since 2005. His audience is thousands of eager bloggers trying to figure out how to make their own blog more successful.

Everyday he writes a few paragraphs of advice and tips on how to improve a blog. Most of the visitors are beginning bloggers – bloggers who just started their blog and want to learn how to make it better. These advice seeking bloggers consume his wisdom in the magnitude of approximately 15,000 visitors a day.

With this kind of traffic it is no surprise that each of his posts have lots of comments. People leave comments for many reasons: 1) To give praise. 2) To show disapproval. 3) To increase their own traffic. By leaving a comment the person also leaves a link back to their own website in the hopes that somebody will click on it and visit their site. This is great for them, but it is also great for us because they leave a foot print – a permanent record of their existence.

Problogger has an archive section on which is stored all the posts and comments since 2005. Anybody can go and look at the posts from 2005. The posts are there and so are the comments. BINGO!

We can go back in time. We can go to 2005 and have a look at the comments for each post. Each comment has a link back to the commenter’s website. In 2005 the commenter was a beginning blogger seeking Darren’s advice on how to make his blog more successful, full of hopes and dreams. Regardless of what his dreams were in 2005, now in 2009 we can find out if (s)he succeeded or not.

A Website That Estimates Traffic to a Website

Lets imagine you are sitting at the bar and next to you is a beautiful and sexy girl listening to you as you eagerly describe your blog. Her eyes are wide open with wonder as you talk about your blog. You are an honest guy: you tell her how much work it is and how slow it is going, how you have been trying to get more visitors but it is a ongoing struggle. She smiles and touches your knee – she seems to like you. Being an optimist you start to think about what you will make her for breakfast in the morning.

But then disaster strikes. In walks a fast talking, Fabio haired, blue eyed, muscles bulging from his tight shirt lady’s man. He has it all – he rarely leave the bar alone. He sees the girl next to you and makes his approach to her with a complete disregard of your feelings. He runs a hand through his bangs slowly, making sure the girl notices his camel back biceps. After introducing himself and making a lame joke he begins to talk to her about his blog. He claims that it has 10,000 visitors a day and that he makes $100/hour. The girl is impressed – you are screwed. Looks like it is going to be another night of checking your pathetic blog stats alone.

But all is not lost yet. Fortunately you never go to the bar without your laptop. You pull it out and go to the website webtraffic24.com. It is a website that provides an estimate of how many visitors a website gets. You simply type in a URL and click a button. webtraffic24.com will then check the page rank, alexa rank, backlinks, etc of the website and using an algorithm return an estimate of the amount of traffic the website receives. It is not perfect, it is just an estimate. But an estimate is usually all you need – you need to know whether a website gets around 10 visitors a day or 10,000.

After typing in the stupid brute’s blog address you get the results – 20 visitors a day. Just as you suspected – another bullshitter making false claims about their blog to pick up girls. Proudly you show the girl the results. Seeing the number she slaps the brute and turns back to you – ‘tell me more about your blog’.

 

Combining Problogger’s Archives with Webtraffic24.com to Count Dead Blogs

Using the URL left behind by the commentors in the problogger archive with the webtraffic24 tool we can count dead blogs. All we need to do is to go back to the old comments, for example in 2006, and using webtraffic24 see how the blogs are doing now. To simplify I have broken up the amount of daily visitors a website receives into 3 main states:

• Dead (0-500 visitors/day)
• Serious Injury (500-2000 visitors/day)
• Alive and Well (2000+ visitors/day)

Webtraffic24 is not 100% accurate but it is good enough – it can separate the dead from the living.

How to Find Out the Success Rate of Blogs

To determine the success rate of blogs and websites I have done the following:

1. From the problogger.com archived posts comment section I have taken all the URLs for the month of January 2006. There was a total of 2514 comments for that month.
2. I had to do some editing:
   • When somebody put a link to a specific webpage I edited the URL to just the homepage. For example, if the the URL was www.mywebsite.com/my-dream-of-having-a-great-blog.html I changed it to www.mywebsite.com.
   • I excluded Darren Rowse’s comments.
   • I excluded all URL’s that were email addresses.
3. After getting rid of all the duplicates (same person who made more then 1 comment that month) I was left with 693 distinct URLs. 693 eager bloggers and webmasters hoping to be successful one day.
4. Using webtraffic24 I checked each URL to see where it stands today. Is is dead, injured or alive.

I gathered all the data into a single table (download table). Each URL and its statistics are recorded. With the table complete it is a simple matter of adding up the living and the dead.

 

How Many Blogs Become Successful And How Many Die – The Results

• Total URLs: 693
• Dead: 497 (download table)
• Serious Injury: 81 (download table)
• Alive and Well: 115 (download table)

If you were a commentor on problogger during January 2006, here are the odds of what state your blog will be in three years:

Analysis

72% chance of total failure. It is high but not as high as the 99% claimed by people who ‘just know’. Another way of looking at it is you have 28% of your blog not being dead in 3 years.

I was quite surprised by these results. They are much better then I expected. Even while working on this blog I was under the assumption that there is a 99% failure rate. I am glad that it is not that bad.

To answer my original question: 72 out of every 100 blogs die.

Of course this experiment has some flaws. The biggest one is that there is no way to tell how well these blogs where doing at the time they made the comment (January 2006). It is possible, although very unlikely, that all the Alive and Well blogs where alive and well in January 2006. The only real conclusion that can be made is that in 3 years 72% of the commentor’s blogs have died.

The second flaw is that problogger commentors do not represent the entire blogging sample. There is a lot of commentors but they do not represent the whole. It is possible that by being a problogger commentor you improve your blog and your chance of avoiding death. Maybe problogger commentors have a 72% chance of death but bloggers as a whole have 99%. Unfortunately there is no way to tell because there is no means to count dead bodies on the entire blog population. This experiment applies to all blogs only by assuming that problogger commentors are bloggers just like everybody else. But if you want the certainty of a 28% chance of avoiding death then become a problogger commentor.

More Then Dead

497 blogs are dead. Above I defined dead as having less then 500 visitors a day according to website24.com. Having anything less then 500 visitors a day for a website or blog is only virtually dead (you probably will not be making too much money) because even 3 visitors a day is still not dead. True dead is 0 visitors. 0 visitor happens when website24 cannot find the domain – which means the owner of that domain canceled the hosting and the domain is unused. Out of the 497 dead blogs 192 are truly dead – 28% of the total and 39% of the virtual dead.

Further Study

The data for this experiment was only 1 months worth of problogger comments. Of course it would be better to use a whole years worth of comment URLs. But, as you can probably imagine, that would be a lot of work. For 2006 problogger probably has over 30,000 comments. If you eliminate the duplicate URLs you might be left with at least 5000 URLs. I cannot imagine anybody wanting to collect all those URLs and then run them through website24. I would be glad to see it, but I am not going to do it.

What I might do in the future is to check how many blogs die within 6 months.  Instead of going back 3 years I will go back 6 months.

Acknowledgments

• Thank you www.problogger.net for having such a great archive.
• Thank you www.webtraffic24.com for not blocking my IP during my 693 website checks.
• Finally I would like to thank Robby G for his post http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/06/28/perseverance-will-save-your-blog/ because it gave me the idea for this post.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Optimistic and Motivational, There is a HOW TO in the Post, What YOU Expect vs Reality