Self-Devpt. Nuggets™

On 4th May 2014 my 9 year old spontaneousdevelopment.com was taken over by Aplus.net. But within a few days I moved my content to what I boldly declared would be a SUPERIOR reincarnation at www.tayosolagbade.com.

As at October 2014, I’d surpassed ALL performance levels I achieved with my old domain spontaneousdevelopment.com.

Indeed, with the exception of traffic, when I wrote about this incident about 4 months ago, I was already recording more than double my old newsletter subscription rates, as well as sales leads generation and conversions.

However, website traffic on tayosolagbade.com was still much lower compared to what it used to be on my lost domain, which peaked into May 2014 at just under 2,500 visits per day. And I was feeling quite cool about it back then – especially since I was getting formal emails from advertising companies wishing to partner with me to post ads for my visitors.

Other than that, I’ve never been one to make much of a fuss about traffic.

It goes without saying though that attracting more traffic – especially if it is the right kind i.e. from a pre-qualified target audience – implies more eyeballs on your offers/content.

Over time, this does boost name recognition and search engine visibility as well.

I always knew the traffic to my website – especially the blog – would eventually pick up.

I knew this from past experience. It was just to be a matter of time.

If you’ve been a follower of my writing for a while, you most likely know that I have said that authentic success is always repeatable and reproducible.

And I have always been an advocate and keen practitioner of authentic success achievement.

You see, the key to achieving that kind of success is carefully studying what you do to find out WHY you succeed, then making diligent efforts to do those things that make you succeed, again and again.

Where possible, you will employ improved methods and strategies, to increase your rate and quality of success achievement.

If you do it right, it’s just a matter of time before you climb right back up to the former levels of success and eventually exceed them.

That is exactly what has been happening on this blog over the past month and a half.

In my usual habit of periodically checking to see how things are progressing, I’ve been monitoring the website visitors “Stats” auto generated by the WordPress  plug-in installed in the right panel of this blog.

[NB: I know this is not necessarily a finely accurate indicator of actual traffic. But it serves my needs because, what I use it mainly for is to get a “feel” for the difference (be it an increase or decrease) in visits over time.]

Since May 2014 when I moved my blog to tayosolagbade.com, I’ve had to start from zero visits showing on that widget.

Then for several weeks on end, I saw only single digit counts for Daily Visits. But gradually those numbers began to rise – though only to a few hundreds per day.

Rather than fix my attention on that however, I focused on creating new and varied content daily, as had been my practice with the old domain.

But this time around, I drew from the lessons I’d learnt from over a year of daily making DAILY blog posts.

Not too long ago – on 18th October 2014 – my eye caught an unusually high number of visits (over 3,000) for the day before (i.e. 17th). Also, the visits for that day itself were already above 2,000 even though the time  was still around noon!

It was the first time in a long time that I had bothered to look at the stats.

Weeks before then, I’d seen numbers around the 1,500 to 1,800 visits per day range.

But they never went up to 2,000 visits per day!

So this made me pay attention over the next few days, and that was when I realized how far my efforts had gone.

By the 21st October 2014, I was seeing visits shoot well over 5,000 per day several times, and generally stay above 4,000 for others!

See some screenshots I took below…

Now, I hasten to note again, that I’m not so interested in traffic. I only discuss this development because it shows another way to measure the impact of one’s blogging efforts.

For me, since I don’t do adverts and do not get paid for “traffic”, it’s not my priority.

However such noticeable improvements provide useful feedback. I was keen to see which aspect of my content was getting that much attention.

So I began checking views per posts to establish some trends.

Eventually, I narrowed down to my weekly newsletter on public speaking and weekly blog posts on entrepreneurship (especially those on farm business), followed by those on parenting, and career development – in that order.

These are some of the categories under which I publish posts on this blog.

I believe most of the visits are from people with interests in those areas, and the experience based stories I often tell resonate with them – hence the growing interest.

Other than that, I cannot think of any other thing that could have generated that much interest.

This brings me to my main reason for recalling the above and writing this piece…

As with everything else in life, the above described positive development has also attracted some negative attention, from mean spirited individuals.

In this case I refer to hackers.

It’s nothing new. Most websites online, especially those deemed to be getting good traffic, ultimately become targets of hacking attempts.

Years ago, I had a spammer hack into my website (on spontaneousdevelopment.com) via a security flaw in the code contained in a CGI script I naively installed. He then used a spam robot to launch massive spam campaigns from my old domain – and that got my hosting account suspended by my webhost for a week at the time, because they assumed I had done it!

More recently, before I lost spontaneousdevelopment.com (my 9 year old domain), I wrote several blog posts sharing security issues I was alerted to by Google via email updates they sent me.

At a stage mid-last year (2013) I even had a case in which efforts were made – over several months – to use negative SEO strategies to discredit my website with Google etc.

For instance, some people went to great lengths to link BACK to different pages on my website from ADULT (i.e. pornographic) websites!

Yep. It happened!

Each time I discovered this during my checks, I would use the DISAVOW tools in Google Webmaster interface to try dislodging them.

But a week or two later, I would discover more simply got added!

Eventually, I chose to ignore them and instead began “fighting back” by focusing on publishing better content MORE often.

Over time, that problem went away. That happened with spontaneousdevelopment.com.

I could be wrong, but it would appear tayosolagbade.com’s success has begun to attract some negative attention…

Something VERY strange and unusual has been happening.

This blog’s website statistics widget (which I earlier showed screenshots of) NOW periodically gets reset to zero!

I don’t know how or why it happens, but it has now happened several times over the past few weeks. And the frequency of occurrence is increasing.

In fact, earlier this afternoon, the abuse level had been taken up a notch:

Instead of just the day’s visit being reset, even the week and month’s visit have also been reset so the numbers now make no sense – see below.

I already know what I need to do, but I share “news” of this development here, only to point out that pursuing success will sometimes attract detractors, and negativity.

Rather than complain, we should always aim to use those attempts to pull us back or bring us down, to MOTIVATE ourselves to do even better than we are already doing.

Remember that if you were not doing well they would not bother about you.

You would be where they WANT you to be i.e. down, and out.

So, if they are coming after you, it can only mean they see that you’re going places – and that bothers them.

Be proud of yourself for achieving that!

Rest assured in the knowledge that as long as you keep your heart pure and your faith in the Creator strong, NOTHING they do can ever stop you.

They can hurt you, but it will only be temporary.

You WILL always bounce back to even greater reckoning if you don’t quit.

And if you keep doing that, your progress will ultimately take you out of their reach.

Enjoy your weekend!