New Year Notes and News

We're back from our holidays and ready to resume our storytelling and underwater photo sharing with our readers. We hope all of you had a nice holiday season.

We thought we'd begin 2009 with a short review of the past year on The Right Blue. We spent a bit of time going over the blog's traffic statistics for the full year of 2008, paying special attention to where our traffic came from, and which articles and photos appeared to be the most popular with our readers. We'd like to share some things we discovered.

Average monthly traffic to The Right Blue over the past year has tripled, compared to 2007. Our biggest source of traffic in 2008 was StumbleUpon, and we are grateful to the readers who Stumbled various articles on The Right Blue. We don't request Stumbles, so all of that traffic was organic -- and that's the way we like it.

Speaking of organic traffic, the second largest source of traffic to The Right Blue was from search, especially the Google and Google Image search engines. In 2008, more than a third of the traffic to The Right Blue was from search. (And did you notice? Google gave us a 'promotion' of sorts, recently raising The Right Blue's page rank to 5.)

The top five articles on The Right Blue for 2008, based on average monthly traffic since the time of posting, were:

1. The Cave Where Turtles Die
2. Dotted Sea Slug from the Mediterranean
3. The Leaf Scorpionfish
4. Exotic Underwater Nudies - The Spanish Dancer
5. Bubble Coral

That number one article, which is about an underwater cave full of sea turtle skeletons at Malaysia's Sipadan Island, was posted in mid-June. Since then, that article's URL has been visited well over 20,000 times. The article also has been linked to by other bloggers and websites more than any other item on The Right Blue, and the photos that accompanied the article have been 'borrowed' a lot, too.

Each week we post a stand-alone photo for Wordless Wednesday (and more recently for Watery Wednesday as well). Participation in these photo memes brings some additional traffic to The Right Blue, and some of those visitors have become regular readers. We have noticed that nearly all the photos we have posted for Wordless/Watery Wednesday immediately begin to generate search traffic, too, so the photos are viewed again and again long after they were posted for the memes.

The top five Wordless/Watery Wednesday (i.e, photo only) posts on The Right Blue for 2008, based on average monthly traffic since the time of posting, were:

1. Bubble Coral with Tiny Shrimp
2. Juvenile Shark in the Red Sea
3. Masked Butterflyfish (Chaetodon semilarvatus) - Red Sea
4. Emperor Angelfish (Pomacanthus imperator) - Red Sea
5. Hard Corals on a Shallow Red Sea Reef

Coming Attractions

What's coming up on The Right Blue for 2009? Of course we will post more illustrated 'creature features', since those stories definitely are the most popular. We also will present more tips for divers, and tell more tales about the adventures of the Marathon Diving Club back in the early days of diving. Speaking of adventures, there will be more wreck diving tales, and more stories about memorable dive trips.

We're also preparing a series of articles about the only period of time when we were paid to dive. This memorable assignment, which last for several months, was a unique experience for us. It entailed a lot of hard work underwater, but it was both exciting and lucrative. Have we piqued your interest? Here's a hint: Hollywood!!

Stay tuned...