What I Learnt From My Keanu Kerfuffle

I stumble across news my fave living writer, James Ellroy is working on a new film called The Nightwatchman. Then I read Keanu Reeves is going to play the lead role. Keanu as me?

Gold.

Two celebratory postings later, The Nightwatchman Movie: The Good News And The Bad News and Keanu Reeves: Time For A Reassesment? and I move on to things a little more interesting like plugging my friend, Nick Jones' book sculptures to Neatorama

Neatorama link here to The Nightwatchman and wahey, if about six hours 100 people come here to check out his stuff.

For a smalltime blogger bloke like me, this is a top result. Links from bigger sites like Neatorama are rare and only when I send an email update to friends I get over 100 visitors in the day. It's taken quite a lot of hard work to get the almost 700 regular visits I get monthly.

Then on Sunday morning the visitor statistics exploded.

500 freakin' visitors in eight hours.

And they ALL came to read Keanu Reeves: Time For A Reassesment? - which was posted on the front pages of Keanuweb, Club Keanu and a couple other fansites.

With over 2000 fans visiting my site in only three days, my newfound attention hasn't been totally bodacious.

Here's what I've learnt...

Keep an eye on your comments bit.
See here and here. Some of my readers' comments could have landed me into a huge defamation suit.

Spell out what other sites can and can't do with your content.
While they meant well, a few fansites cut'n'pasted my entire stories onto their sites without proper attribution. Merely stating your site runs on a Creative Commons license doesn't quite cut it.

Stick with what you're good at.
If I wanted to get thousands of visitors a day I could turn this into a fully fledged celebrity site. But that's not what I dig.

From looking at my visitors' clicking behavior I can say that people who come through the quick celebrity route only look at the one story they're after then they get the hell out. Keanu fans did just that while visitors who came via Neatorama looked at over three other pages per visit.

Get a better web counter.
Until this weekend Statcounter's been perfect. Its big flaw is that you can only check out visitor behavior for the last 100 page impressions. Want more and you have to pay them. Lucky I was saved by installing the new Google Analytics thingy last week.

Fame and celebrity is fleeting.
Keanuweb, the site which brought me all these thousands of visitors disappeared off the side of the earth yesterday. Yes, that's right. I'm back to 25 visitors a day.

I wonder what would happen if a really big site like Boing Boing linked to me?