It was one year ago, August 13, 2007, that TailgatingIdeas.com was born. This post, Tailgating Games to Play, starting it all off. Who knew this blog would grow into what it is today?
It has been a lot of hard work of late nights and long weekends trying to maintain this website but it has been a labor of love as well. Even though this blog is only a year old, let’s do some looking back to see where we have come from and where we are today.
In just one year, TailgatingIdeas.com has reeled in close to 117,000 hits and over 106,000 unique visitors. That translates to close to a quarter-million (249,249 to be exact) page views in just one year. It was slow going at first let me tell you. My first visitors started showing up on August 20, 2007 and that was after a full week of blogging. Still only 20 people showed up all day and it was probably because they found me by accident. My how things have changed. I am willing to bet that there are probably at least 20 people reading this same blog right now as you are reading it.
So after a year what do people find interesting to read on here? Naturally the home page was the most popular of places to visit but individual posts have gotten quite a few visitors as well. The most popular post to date has to be The 14 Tailgaters Who Annoy the Crap Out of You. That post has been viewed close to 27,000 times with half of that traffic coming by way of a link from Sports Illustrated’s Campus Clicks. (Thanks Mallory for the link.) The next most popular post had to be the Party-a-Cargo Tow Hitch Mounted Kegerator article I wrote. That post “went viral” and numerous gadget blogs and websites were linking to it. Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated Extra Mustard Hot Clicks also picked up on it and linked it. Rounding out the top eight most popular posts on TailgatingIdeas.com as judged by the sheer page views from you the readers are #4: Port-O-Pong Portable Beer Pong Table, #5; Gallery of Gabriella Fox, #6: The Bucket List For tailgaters, #7: Super Bowl Bans Tailgating and #8: Flip Cup Championship Comes to New York.
Most people use search engines to find the information they are looking for and tailgaters are no different. Boy have things changed in just a year when it comes to TailgatingIdeas.com’s search engine rankings. August 20, 2007 saw four visitors come in via Google. What a difference a year makes. August 6, 2008, Google brought in 836 visitors to Tailgating Ideas. A year ago, this blog was buried in the search engine results pages, relegated to page 16 for the terms “tailgating ideas” and page 37 for the term “tailgating”. Today this site ranks No. 1 on Google for the search term tailgating ideas and consistently ranks No. 2 or No. 3 (depending on the day) on Google for the term tailgating. Go ahead and call me a liar and check it for yourself.
So all in all it has been a very good year. I’d like to thank especially my advertisers who have been loyal and believed in this blog to be a valuable advertising venue. Make sure to visit Cornhole.com, How The Pros Play, FireWire Grilling Skewers, LadderGolf.com, SexyBeerBongs.com (NSFW) and LetsGoTailgating.com and let them know you appreciate them supporting TailgatingIdeas.com.
Here is to another year of TailgatingIdeas.com bringing you the most up to date tailgating tips, unique tailgating gear, great recipes, biting commentary and a little bit of humor. I hope you enjoyed reading it over the past year as much as I enjoyed creating it. If you have any suggestions as to how to make this blog better in the coming year, please leave a comment below.