Just a note on site stats: Ever since we switched to having the blog built in to the site, the blog home page and individual posts are now overwhelmingly the most popular pages at telltenfriends.com.

That means that now, if I want to know how many people are reading about services, etc. I have to dig a little deeper, because none of the pages on the main site are in the top 5 of my site stats anymore.

This tells me two things.

1. People are more interested in what I have to say than what my site is selling. This is hardly shocking, and is certainly not bad news to me. In fact, it only reinforces what I (and many others) have been saying all along.

2. If you build it, people will come. Okay, that IS a straight rip-off of Field of Dreams, which was originally written by one of the great authors of our time, W.P. Kinsella, who’s from right here in BC. (I’m a fan. Let’s move on, shall we?)What I mean by that is that if you publish relevant, personal, valuable and up-to-date content, traffic will come. The best way to do that is to build a darn blog.

I’m a copywriter and conversion specialist. I sweat over tiny details: keywords, conversion rates, punctuation, and a whole lot of other subtle nuances that factor into a site’s effectiveness. And it turns out that when I’m just me being me, sharing my views and insights on things that may or not be related to marketing, that’s where the traffic comes from.

I realize that this is skewed, since many of you come back time and time again just to see what’s new. But isn’t that the point? I’ve been a “blogger” for less than a year, and I’m thrilled that people read this stuff at all. In fact, I’m floored by the consistency and steady incline in the number of visitors and subscribers. (Side note: The switch from Blogger resulted in a big jump in the number of subscribers to the feedburner feed!) Yes, I read my stats. All of them. It gives me a better idea each day of what people respond to, and subsequently helps me when it comes to doing the same for my clients.

Bonus link:: One of my mentors, Scott Armstrong has just started his own blog, giving advice to young entrepreneurs. Scott is the author of the Start Me Up! Business Guidebook for the young at young at heart, and started his blog on my advice. It was a fair trade, since I’ve been benefitting from his advice for months.

The book is intended for students that are looking to answer the call of entrepreneurship (Instead of wating until they’re all grown, like I did). If you have youngsters that may want to subscribe to his blog, fear not; a feedburneer feed and other publicizing features will be added to his site soon.

In the Vancouver Province newspaper on Sunday, there was a story about a guy who auctioned off his support for a World Cup team on eBay. For $15 hard-earned dollars, a group of his co-workers bought his support, for their beloved Serbia (and Montenegro).

Over at Adcouver, Ryan explains in a very meaningful and heart-felt post why he’s a South Korea fan. If you’ve already seen pictures of my wife and I, then you might be able to guess why I too am a Korea fan. Ryan’s experience was a unique one, being a tall, white foreigner caught up in one of the most powerful moments of national pride and unity that we may see in our lifetimes. While he was partying it up on the streets of Seoul, I was in Victoria, falling in love with all things Korean; their underdog-made-good-team-of-heroes soccer team, and of course the woman who would soon become my wife.

(image: Me in my “Be The Reds!” t-shirt my brother-in-law brought me from Korea)

To get an idea what things were like over here for me while he was there, trade the millions of fans in the streets for smaller, equally patriotic and exuberant groups of Korean fans partying in the streets of sleepy Victoria, BC. Add to that the massive swell of “bandwagon jumpers” (like myself) who watched closely while Korea became the new darlings of the sport; as famous for their teamwork and fast feet as for the massive seas of red shirts in the stands at every game.

This time the games are being played in Germany. If you were lucky enough to catch Korea’s 2-1 win over Togo yesterday, then you already know that geography is of little consequence; the Red Devils are still out in full force, outnumbering alternatively colored shirts (Togo fans?) by more than two-to-one, and they never stop chanting and cheering.

Ryan and I may not look at all like them, but we too want to see Korea advance to the semi-finals again this year. Who knows, maybe this time they’ll surprise us again, and go on another storied run.

OOOOOOOOOH PIL-SIN KO-RE-AAAA!!!

Well, here we are at our new home, at the new-and-improved telltenfriends.com. The site was designed by the incredibly talented Rob Masefield, Web Developer, Designer and Photographer.

We were looking for a very distinctive “Web 2.0” look and feel, and Rob has done a fine job of conveying that image, if I do say so myself. Perhaps the best part about the new site is that it is loaded with options. For instance, RSS pros will notice that each post (at its individual url) has icons for almost any program that you use; making subscription, trackbacks, digging, monitoring comments (and a bunch of stuff I don’t even understand) all possible with the click of a button.

I must ask a favor however; as the Designer himself has departed on a tour of our fine country, it would be great if you could leave a quick comment about the new digs; so I can verify the feed has switched over properly (subscribers, this means you) and that comments are indeed working.

If it all works out, I will respond quite excitedly in the comments myself.
Cheers, all. Hope you like the new-look Tell Ten Friends!

Update: The urls of the pages on the site are still defaulting to the test server. I’m trying to work it out.