With the holiday weekend and all of the festivities that come along with it GrandmasterB didn’t get as much posting done as he’d like. However, the two articles posted over the week generated a ton of buzz and a good deal of traffic along with them. After the long weekend of no posting and little activity on the site I was beginning to think everyone shutdown their computers and went on vacation, but that wasn’t the case. On Memorial Day after posting my first ever tutorial the site stats lit up like the Fourth of July and GrandmasterB.com destroyed another milestone.

If you recall my last Week in Review post I had finally reached the 300 visitor mark (Analytics) and set 500 as the next mark. GrandmasterB.com not only reached 500 visits on Memorial Day, it shot right by and didn’t look back until tallying up 641 visits! My tutorial was a success and I had the numbers to prove it. The Illustrator tutorial shot past the previously most viewed post in a single day and is still climbing the charts. The only thing left to do now is raise the bar once again, and since I’m so close already 750 visits isn’t enough of a challenge…I want 1000 visits in a day! Do you think GrandmasterB can do it? Better yet when do you think I’ll reach my goal? I’ve charted out my previously reached goals to give you a little detail into the RISE OF GRANDMASTERB!

• 3/30 - 50 Visits Reached
• 4/12 - 100 Visits Reached
• 4/16 - 200 Visits Reached
• 5/14 - 300 Visits Reached
• 5/26 - 500 Visits Reached (641 Visits)
• 1000 Visits Reached - TO BE DETERMINED

What do you think? With the numbers in front of you how long until GrandmasterB reaches 1000? Only time will tell…now onto the review.

May 21: Do You Want to Join The StumbleUpon Crusade? - What at first sounded like it could be an interesting way to assist other bloggers in getting their site noticed; has turned into something we would rather not do so publicly. Our intentions were good, but it appeared that after reading some things about SUs rules against promoting stumbles we have decided it’s best not to go with this approach.

May 26: Create a Logo for Your Featured Posts - The tutorial mentioned earlier that took off and never looked back. This Illustrator tutorial (for beginnger/intermediate levels) shows how to take text and using another logo make something unique for your blog. Check it out…it’s very cool and easy to do.

Well, folks it’s about time to me to head to the office for the day. I’ll be posting some stuff later on this evening after the work day.

~ GrandmasterB

The week in review is a day late this week, I apologize. I have been working to get some things done at the office before the big Memorial Day weekend so I don’t come back to a ton of work after five days off. This past weekend was the two month anniversary of the site and I managed to get an insane amount of traffic to the site over the past week (mainly because of that silly Miley Cyrus post…hehe).

Back on April 16th I surpassed my goal of 200 visits in a day (according to Analytics) , so I raised the bar to 300 visits for my next goal. The stats dipped a little bit and got back over 200 on May 3rd (Economic Stimulus and Another Year Older), then on May 14th that little post I mentioned earlier got noticed and blew up. That day I broke the 300 visit mark for the first time tallying 359 visits. The site has maintained a fair amount of traffic every day since averaging just over 150 visits/day. The extremely cool thing about that is the aforementioned post was noticed by Google and was listed sixth for the search term “Miley Cyrus Got Milk Ad”. Now is not the time to rest on my laurels though…onto bigger and better posts. There’s always room for improvement, so until that next monumental post here’s the Week In Review.

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Yesterday, I posted my Month in Review a few days early because I had some great news to share with my readers. I decided it was time to put the test the full power of this battle station…err blog. In order to maximize my viewers I tested really hammered the StumbleUpon crowd. With the help of the EntreCard Forums (Daily Stumble…check it out) and my blogging buddies the site saw it’s biggest traffic day ever! When I wrote the Economic Stimulus and Another Year Older I ran a small StumbleUpon campaign asking friends and the EntreCard crowd to Stumble the post, but I’ve never really focused much on StumbleUpon before that. After reviewing the numbers for the past 24-hours I will definitely be using it more.

Alright GrandmasterB Get On With It…Let’s See Some Numbers

Yesterday’s post (Miley Cyrus’ Got Milk Advertisement Gets Hugh Hefner Excited) was the ultimate in boosting my numbers; I completely blew my previous record out of the water. Prior to yesterday, my record number of visits was 259 for a single day…just 41 visits shy of my goal of 300 that I set for myself back on April 17 (One Month Already?). Within a few hours of publishing the post yesterday (2:45pm MDT) the site had racked up 245 views and by the time I’m writing this post (within 24 hours) the site has received a whopping 551 views. Yesterday’s post alone has received 459 views…holy crap! These numbers are from the Wordpress Stats plug-in, which tracks based on GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). I chose to use these numbers simply because it gave me the ability to track within a 24-hour time period.

To give you an idea of how much of yesterday’s traffic can be attributed to StumbleUpon and the viral (in my case not quite viral) effect it can have on a post you have to look deeper in the stats. The total number of referrals (top10) was 397 for the day; StumbleUpon accounted for 382 of the total referrals. That is some Freakin’ Amazing, Fantastical Power! Forest of The Random Forest was looking to start a StumbleUpon Network of buddies, but it didn’t take. Perhaps now we can get something rolling with numbers behind it.

So what do you guys think of StumbleUpon? Have you had any success with getting posts stumbled in the past? Do you have any secrets you’d like to share with the masses? I’d love to hear what you guys/gals have to say…light it up!

After seeing the now famous images of Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair and her new Milk Mustache advertisement Hugh Hefner has stepped into the “perv zone”. Apparently, Hugh-jass has stated that he would like to have 15 year-old Miley appear in Playboy. Of course, once he realized that he sounded like the world’s oldest pedophile he backtracked stating they would wait until she reached the legal age. Too late Hef, we all know that you like ‘em young you sick bastard. You helped us all confirm what we have known for years…you are a perverted, pajama clad old man.

What was that all about? That’s what I call getting you Googlebots excited enough to read my latest post. I’ve been trying to develop a decent post that would hook you all into reading it…did it work? I’m writing my “Month in Review” a few days early, because the stats (or main stat) are very impressive…at least in my eyes.

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