brandonsmith.com

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/ paladin1787 / Leave a comment

A graph of traffic to this site by month, starting in April 2009. I switched domains from greenletters.wordpress.com to brandonsmith.com in late October, which seems to have helped marginally. The monthly peak was November, with 456 hits.

Was reviewing the statistics on this site today, and thought I’d quickly share my findings with you.

  • While “smokestacks” is the search term that’s brought the most viewers to my site, “springerlies” is a close second. Who would have thought I’d have the number four Google spot for the name of the cookie my grandmother makes? (I wrote them into a menu of mine.)
  • My theory that this domain would launch me out of the sea of other Brandon Smiths (all likely great guys, of course) has been proven correct in a couple ways. Yesterday’s post featured a woman who found me more or less by accident. And if you Google “Brandon Smith Chicago” (with or without the quotes) you find my ChicagoNow profile and two links to this website in the top 10.

BrandonSmith.com

/ paladin1787 / Leave a comment

Is now mine.

For my entire life (okay, the twelve years the internet has been mainstream) I didn’t have any hope I’d actually own my name’s domain.

There’s a pro football player with the same name, as well as several other quasi-famous people. I thought they’d be all over the bidding wars, life savings in hand.

As it turns out, no bidding war required. I saw its availability a few days ago and could hardly believe my eyes. It’s worth at least $1,000, probably much more. I know this because a month ago, the company that owns brandonsmith.net offered me that domain for $600, and .coms are worth much more. I paid $97 for mine. It’ll be indispensable to my career from now on.

In a few years I think I’ll buy up a few domains for potential kids’ names. It’s only $10 a year to maintain ownership of each one, and I suspect it could help them quite a bit in life.

This purchase also motivates a redesign of my little corner of the Interwebs. I’ll probably use Columbia’s web team, but I won’t use their hosting since there are lots of restrictions. Luckily a friend of mine has offered me free hosting since he has unlimited space and my material is pretty small, all things considered.