Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Random Musings - January 2012

Random Musings of the Month


January was another record breaking month here at Bonjour Tristesse, with nearly 50,000 views served and crossing over 200,000 pageviews in total.  It took almost 14 months to get the first 100,000 and amazingly only 3 months to double that.

In addition to those crazy stats, I've also reached a significant milestone for the blog.  Tomorrow's entry will be my 500th post!  It's a bit hard to believe since it feels like I started not too long ago, but the post count just slowly creeps up and all of a sudden it's 500.  I want to thank all the cool bloggers who visit and comment daily and provide ample encouragement and support.  Thanks everyone, and I hope you stick around for the next 500!

On another note, I came across a cool feature the other day on YouTube, I don't know how long they've been doing it but I found a page feed that automatically lists all of the trailers I embed onto my blog, check it out HERE.  I'm not sure how or why it's there and I have no control over it, but it seems like an interesting feature nonetheless.

For February, I'm looking forward to the Berlinale, the first major festival of the year, as well as both the Césars and Oscars being presented on the same weekend.  I'm also hoping to do a short Dario Argento marathon for this month's LAMBs in the Director's Chair event.

Random Blogging Tip of the Month

This month's tip is an easy way to give a boost to your movie blog's traffic.  Some of you may already be aware of this one, but for those who aren't, here is a method to lure some juicy traffic your way from the largest and most popular movie site on the internet, IMDb

If you write film reviews and have a free IMDb account, you can manually submit your links to be listed in the External Reviews section for each movie.  I just started doing this a couple months ago and it already accounts for approximately 15% of my visits, so it is a pretty significant amount.  Anyone can do this, and it's not too complicated of a process, I will show you how below:

Just surf to IMDb and look up your movie, then find the External Reviews link either in the sidebar or at the bottom of the page and navigate to it.  I prefer the old style look, so mine appears in the sidebar like this:


Scroll to the bottom and click on the Edit page button.


Select Add 1 item in the drop down menu that appears and click Continue >>.



Carefully follow the instructions provided in the next screen and Enter the URL of your review, and the Description of your blog, then click Check these updates >>.


Now double check that you've entered everything correctly and click Submit these updates.


Finally you should get a confirmation page with a message that looks something like this:


That's it!  In my experience, it usually takes 3 or 4 days after submission for the link to show up and visitors to start arriving.

Your traffic will of course depend on a number of things including how popular a film is, and also on how many other competing reviews have been posted up.  For instance, the external reviews page for Melancholia has over 300 links on it, which is typical for big name releases, and my review only got 4 clicks last month.  While the page for Bullhead (suddenly popular because it was recently nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar) currently only has 74 links and of those 74 only a handful of them are English ones.  This one link alone received over 300 clicks last month.

But even if you only get 4 clicks a month per link on average, multiply that by 100 reviews and that's 400 extra visits a month.  Maybe some of those visitors will like what they find and become regular readers too.  So you can see it's well worth the small time investment of setting up these links.

Random Links of the Month

Here are a handful of interesting blogs I've started reading recently:

http://lisathatcher.wordpress.com - My favorite new discovery is Lisa Thatcher's blog.  She's a very talented Australian writer who posts frequently about interesting and obscure art, music, and films with wonderfully descriptive prose.

http://www.christineutterberg.com/blog/ - Christine is an American actress living in Berlin, who recently started this new blog where she shares concise posts about her interests, hobbies, and updates on her career.

http://thevelvetcafe.wordpress.com - Run by Jessica from Sweden.  A film lover with great taste who posts insightful thoughts in a very easy to read conversational style.

http://aidyreviews.net - Aidy posts reviews focusing mainly on indie and foreign films, so it's no surprise that I enjoying following her blog closely.

http://apotpourriofvestiges.blogspot.com/ - Indian writer/blogger Murtaza passionately reviews films with a particular love for the classics and the occasional current release.

http://www.top10films.co.uk/ - A popular UK blog run by Dan who specializes in top 10 lists but also features frequent reviews and giveaways.
  
That's all for now!   How was your January?  Share your discoveries and thoughts below!
  

38 comments:

A hero never dies said...

Belated congratulations BT on your 500th post and also on those staggering numbers. Colour me jealous!

Bonjour Tristesse said...

 Thank you for reading, I hope you find those links helpful.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thank you Shutter Bug!

Shutter Bug said...

just wanted to congratulate you on all of your success so far! keep up the great work! :)

Inspired Ground said...

Congrats of your page views progress! I love your tips on creating external links in imdb. It's great, and thanks for sharing BT!

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thank you CT.  I agree about January.  Last year it was a huge month as well, and I haven't done anything special either. 

CastorTroy said...

Nice traffic ramp up BT! I'm not sure what it is about January but traffic has also exploded this past month on AM with no direct personal input (i.e. trying to make the IMDb hitlist, Reddit etc...) from me. Hope this keeps up! :)

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thanks, I figured the "As seen on" link was related to it in some way.  I'm guessing the site that gives the most views to a particular video gets linked back to.

d_4 said...

Congratulations on the amazing milestone! And those stats, way! I had a small dip this month. No clue why, it's making its way back up right now.

ALSO the youtube thing is amazing. I believe if you feature a video on your site and it's the most viewed, it comes up on that particular video. "As seen on Bonjour Tristesse" is what should appear, and if they click it they'll find the page you linked and from there they can visit your site. I love how that works.

The Reel Foto said...

Congrats! Hmmm, maybe I should make a movie blog....

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thanks Jessica!  I do enjoy following your blog because your reviews are always so personal. 

And I agree it's better to get links up for the smaller foreign ones because there's usually far less competition.  With the popular films you get lost in a sea of blue links.

Jessica said...

Congratulations! Awesome numbers! You have every reason to feel proud. I'm baffled at how productive you are, and with that quality!
Thank you for the kind mentioning.

I've also started to put in external links at IMDB. So far I've only done a few but I plan to do some more, focusing on the small and Scandinavian movies to begin with, where there barely are any English reviews. It feels less urgent to become the 300d blog to write about Mission Impossible...

Bonjour Tristesse said...

 Thanks Diana.  I'll keep an eye out for that post!

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thanks Joel.  No problem.  I started out the other day by clicking random blogs in the list looking for new interesting blogs to read, and after noticing many of them were dormant I quit, then I found that forum thread and figured it would be useful to systematically go through and keep track of all the dead LAMBS. 

Bonjour Tristesse said...

 Thanks NTE!  I'm happy to help.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

It's such a useful resource, and nobody ever talks about it, I had to figure it out on my own, maybe those in the know were keeping it a secret and hoarding the traffic for themselves...

Bonjour Tristesse said...

 Thank you Dezzy!  5000 a day, and over a million hits total.  You are my inspiration!

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thank you Amir.  I appreciate your visits and kind words.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thanks Max, I'm glad you found it useful! 

Diana said...

Congrats on your epic 200.000 hits, great job! I love your blog and I really should visit it more often. 
Speaking of Bullhead, check out the LAMb devours Oscars posts, the Foreign Film one has a cool mention you might like :) 
Also, thanks for the tip on IMDb, I am planning to do that very soon, it is a great source of traffic. Have a great February!

DEZMOND said...

Congrats on the numbers! Visits always rise after some time if you have quality like you do :) I remember when I had 1oo visits per day at the beginning and now I have up to 5,000 visitors every day :)
And I love Dan from TOPTEN FILMS!

NeverTooEarlyMP said...

I'm loving that you are keeping track of these milestones. It gives the rest of us hope for our own work, and a way to celebrate you. Congrats!

Thanks especially for the IMDB info. I've always wondered how to break into that, but never experimented enough to figure it out. 

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thanks Lurker!

Chip said...

Wow, I've been on IMDB since before they had those links and it never occurred to me to try to add my own.  Even though I knew things like Goofs and Trivia were submitted via IMDB pages, it never occurred to me that links to reviews could also be submitted.  I had assumed that the IMDB people just did those.  I will definitely be doing this.  Thanks for the tip!

Joel Burman said...

Congrats on both the stats and for closing in on 500 posts!

Also I again want to thank you for doing that Dead LAMB check on the first 400 sites just like that! You totally made my day with that move! Thanks! 

I'll also post this post on the thread LAMB forum thread on traffic sources. I actually didn't know of this external IMDB reviews. 

Max Covill said...

Wow, didn't know about the IMDB trick. I'll be sending a lot of my reviews up there. I love this site since you review films I might never hear of. Thanks.

Amir said...

Congratz on the milestones. I look forward to reading the next 500!
and it's the first time I'm hearing the IMDB stuff as well, so thank for that!

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thanks Scott, that's nice to hear because your blog is one I look up to.  It will take me a good while if ever to catch up with your monster numbers. 

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thanks AB, I noticed you just passed a quarter million yourself, plus adding those IMDb links should give you a nice boost. 

Bonjour Tristesse said...

My pleasure!  I get a lot of love from the blogging community, so I always try to give it back, and your blog certainly deserves greater attention.

The Angry Lurker said...

Good to hear things are blossoming over here, congrats and well deserved....

FrontRoomCinema said...

Well done on your milestone BT. I am always in awe of your cool site. 

Good tip about IMDb. I have been doing it for about the last 8 months and I get plenty traffic over from there!! Plus it is very good for SEO!

Andrew Buckle said...

Congrats on the milestones - and those stats are enormous. Thanks for sharing the IMDB tip too - and reminding me about Dario Argento. I'm going to get on that too!

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Thanks for the compliments FilmMasterT.  The number of followers is a bit misleading,  I did a lot of following other blogs when I first started, and many of them followed back.  But a lot of them are no longer bloggers.  I'd say at least half of them.

Lisa Thatcher said...

Oh My - thank you SO much for the super write up (it's no secret to everyone here that I adore your blog) and especially for the classy new links. 
My little offering is SO modest compared to yours - I DREAM of traffic like that. I also have a modest post count compared with you (and FilmMasterT below) but the main thing is I am loving the writing. When you do it for the pleasure-of-the-post its all about the  art and the traffic comes when it does. We film heads have the luxury of being able to disappear into celluloid so thank god for film, for community and for conversation. All the numbers are an added bonus. 
Thanks again for the mention - but mostly for the blog. 
Lisa 

FilmMasterT said...

Great post! I have almsot 300 posts and I only started in April 2011.  So far, I have over 100 000 views, but not that many followers like you have. You have a great blog and deserve your stats :) 

David Zou said...

Thanks for the introduction,I did not know the feature until I read this post,very helpful tips indeed!!

Bonjour Tristesse said...

 Glad you found it useful, hope you get some new traffic from it.

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