I made a rather auspicious discovery the other day. As regular readers of my blog can attest, I quite often use famous quotes either in the titles or in the body of my posts. What you don't know though, is that before including a quote, I research it online. Sometimes I do this just to be sure that the person I'm crediting for that quote is accurate; and when it's unclear or anonymous I don't include any references. Another reason I research is to be sure I've got it right !! I know this is just a silly old blog read by a select group of my friends and family, but I'm very particular about stuff like that. Must be my Type A personality ;-)
Another thing my faithful blog readers may have noticed is the small stat counter included in the margin of my blog. From this I am able to check if there are visitors to my blog, telling me if I'm wasting my time or not. Now don't panic, I can't tell exactly who is visiting, but the counter tells me things like how many visitors I get each day, the time and length of their visit, and their IP address - which is basically useless to me. In addition to this it tells me what city they (or their ISP rather) reside in, and how they came across my page. For example, if you saw on my Facebook page that I posted a new blog entry and clicked on the link, it would tell me that you wandered in via my Facebook page. This coincidentally is the number one source of traffic to my site.
Occasionally I get visitors from other sources too though ... like if you bookmarked my page and just check it on occasion it would tell me that, and I've also had visitors that clicked on the link on my LinkedIn profile. And every once in a while I can see that someone discovered my site through a Google search. My stat counter tells me what search criteria they entered on Google, and also the ranking my page was given when they hit the search button.
It seems one particular quote is extremely popular, as I get a rather high volume of traffic as people search for it’s meaning. The quote I'm referring to is “Throw your heart over the fence and the rest will follow” by Norman Vincent Peale, which I used as the title to a blog entry I posted earlier this year.
Now here (finally) is the auspicious part ... depending on how they worded their query, my blog is the number one result on Google !! I figured it out, and it seems if they type "throw your heart over the fence meaning", that's when I'm ranked number one. If they typed a slightly different combination of words I can fall a little further down in ranking, but most often I'm on the first page of Google's results page. If you typed it precisely as worded above and hit Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button, you will forwarded directly to my blog and that particular post.
At first I was stoked by this discovery, not to mention dumbfounded !! Because of this people from all over the world have visited my blog, and I mean this quite literally. I've had visitors from India, Greece, Russia, Dubai, Pakistan, Italy, the Philippines, New Zealand and the UK, to name a few. It seems I wasn't the only one captivated by this phrase. While most of them don't go beyond that particular posting, some of them hang around a bit and check the archives, reading some additional posts. Cool :)
But while I say I was stoked at first, I also found myself somewhat distraught at this realization. I mean, how many times has someone asked you something, and your answer to them was “Google it”? There are people in the world looking for answers to their questions about something they found meaningful, and they're getting directed to my blog for the answer ?!?! I'm sure this is a far reaching and highly inaccurate conclusion, however the thought of it is still somewhat scary. Hopefully they realize quickly that's it's just a silly little blog by some nobody and continue on with their search ;-) If not, I hope they find my definition somewhat useful. For those who don't remember, or are too lazy to go back and check, my search at the time provided me with the following meaning for that quote: "complete success is attained when you find personal fulfillment in what you do, instead of just going through motions to receive a pay-check. It comes down to making a life versus making a living".
That quote and that definition could have been the turning point in my career transition, and today I feel I have found that success, therefore I have no qualms if someone out there in the world relies on this interpretation.
Let your soul be your pilot :)
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