My wonderful wife Beverly had lung cancer surgery last weekend. It was successful, but the recuperation is slow. So, it’s been a hectic, stressful time for me, and I didn’t get a new post written. Please come back next week and enjoy ElvisBlog as usual.
Phil Arnold, Original ElvisBlogmeister
When you approach the end of your eleventh year of blogging, it’s natural to wonder How much longer do I want to do this? Then you see a stat like the above that shows new visitors keep coming to ElvisBlog, and it gives you renewed enthusiasm.
I’m curious why 749 people checked in on New Year’s Eve, making it the blog’s biggest day of the month. Seems like that would be a low volume day with all the other distractions (especially two college football playoff games).
For what it’s worth, the record day for ElvisBlog in 2015 was October 22 with 2,175 hits (page views). I have no idea why so many people showed up. I Googled to find out what Elvis-related news might have triggered extra interest, but nothing special had gone on.
So, ElvisBlog had a very good year again in 2015. The number of visitors was up a healthy 11% over the previous year. But less than half of all visitors come from the United States. If you can read the fine print under the map, it says, “148 countries in all.” If you ever wanted proof that Elvis still has fans all over the world, here it is. The blue shading on the map indicates the yearly ElvisBlog visitor totals from countries, the more blue, the more visitors. Here’s the way the top five countries stacked up:
USA 46%
UK 17%
Germany 8%
France 5%
Canada 3%
There are a few countries that apparently have almost no Elvis fans. Just one visitor came from each of these nations last year: Indonesia, Turkey, Chile, Pakistan, and Israel.
In 2015, the most read post on the blog was: “So, How Much is an Elvis Autograph Worth, Pt. 1,” originally written back in November 2010. I must thank Google and the other search engines for this.
It appears there are many people out there possessing an Elvis autograph who want to sell it or are at least curious about its value. So they type Elvis Autograph Worth or something similar into the search box, and the top result is the ElvisBlog article. I love that. The more people you attract to the blog, the more who will like it and become regular readers.
However, I can’t explain the reason for the fourth most popular ElvisBlog post: “The Strange Odyssey of Elvis’ Shot Up TV,” written way back in 2007. Maybe a lot of fans find this silly piece of the Elvis legend intriguing, and want to learn more about it.
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There was one new feature added to ElvisBlog in 2015. In the top right corner of the home page is a box where people can subscribe. That simply means that as soon as a new post is added, you get it sent to you via email. You can read it there, or open it up and see the whole home page. The pace of people signing up for this is increasing, so you might want to consider opting for this convenience, too.
I would also like to take this opportunity to cover my other project in 2015. BIG E and the SANTA MAN was a huge success. The outpouring of praise from those who bought the book and loved it is most gratifying. My thanks go out to each of you.
Encouraged by this positive response, I have completed writing a sequel. Both books will be back for sale prior to the 2016 Christmas season. However, my next sales efforts will include every avenue of modern-day book marketing: Amazon, eBook, PayPal. Facebook and other social media presence, you name it. I’ve got nine months to get knowledgeable on this stuff and get it set up prior to the kickoff of the next sales push.
I sent a free copy the book to a person with strong connections to Elvis Presley Enterprises. He emailed me back and said:
“I loved it. Very, very entertaining. I see it as an every year annual Christmas holiday movie.”
When I called to thank him, he said something that floored me.
“When you are ready to present your idea to Graceland, I will send a copy of the book to Priscilla, along with a personal letter of recommendation. I’ll emphasize they should consider how an animated Christmas special made from this story would be a huge revenue producer for EPE. Plus it would attract new young Elvis fans every year it is shown. Graceland is looking for ideas to keep the fan base going even as the older ones pass away. I believe BIG E and the SANTA MAN could do that.”
WOW! It doesn’t get much better than that. I’m ecstatic.
Of course, even if it all unfolds like I hope, it will still be years before the finished product shows up on TV. So, you’ll have a chance to buy the book and add your voice to the ranks of those who want to watch the story on TV.
I HOPE YOU ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO 2016 AS MUCH AS I AM.
The Move to WordPress is Complete:
You probably noticed that ElvisBlog looks a little different. Over the weekend it completed migration to a different blogware platform. Hope you readers will like it. So far, I do.
The big improvement is changing from two-columns to three-columns. I have lots of interesting content planned for the new right column, and that will be installed over time. I also like the way captions under photos are done.
Comments are now so much easier for readers to make. The old set-up was cumbersome and confusing, so there weren’t a lot of comments made. I also started with a negative feeling about comments, because I’d seen them devolve into nasty back and forth epithets by commenters on other sites. Fortunately, that never happened on ElvisBlog. So, now comments are encouraged, and I will reply to any that warrant it. Let’s have more comments.
I’m still working on some things. The banner on the Home Page is justified left, not center, so I have to decipher the CSS style code and figure out how to fix that. Same with the width of the center column, which I want to increase. I’m also deluged by something called Pingbacks. I’m studying about them, and it’s pretty murky, so now I am deleting all of them. I hope I don’t find out that they are something good.
The last report from the old blog platform showed that the total hits (page views) for ElvisBlog had passed over 3 million since the start in 2005. Thanks for your support.
Enjoy the new and improved ElvisBlog.
Phil Arnold
Original Elvis Blogmeister
Posted in ELVISBLOG NEWS, Main Page
BLOG ISSUES:
I am less than a month away from the date my blogware supplier shuts down all the sites. You have to switch over to WordPress or end it all.
I’m finished with the migration to the new platform, but I still have to learn how to manage the theme, banner, archives, font, bla, bla, bla.
For the last ten days, there have been some problems uploading new photos to illustrate the stories. That’s why last week’s post was all text. (Ed. note: photo uploading problem has now been resolved)
Posted in ELVISBLOG NEWS, Main Page
Changes Coming:
For the second time in the 7-1/2 year history of ElvisBlog, our blogware provider has decided to close up shop and migrate us off to a different platform. The first time this happened, the number of visitors and total hits dropped off drastically, and it took almost a year to get them back up.
Perhaps it will be better this time, because ElvisBlog is moving to WordPress, and a number of other bloggers seem to be very happy they use it.
Supposedly the transition will be easy, and there will be tech support available to help with any snags. I’m not so sure, because I always seem to have trouble with this sort of thing. One expected problem may be self-inflicted. ElvisBlog will be going from 2-column format to 3-column, which means the width of the center space for articles will shrink. This probably means that the layout of pictures in articles will change and require going back and adjusting each one. Sounds pretty time consuming.
Anyway, this is an advance warning that the appearance of old articles on ElvisBlog may look screwed up for a while. Sometime in the next two weeks, we’ll pull the trigger and switch to WordPress and see how it goes. Please bear with us.
Phil Arnold
Original Elvis Blogmeister
ElvisBlog
Posted in ELVISBLOG NEWS, Main Page
One Million Hits:
It took the first five years and three months for ElvisBlog to accumulate 1 million total hits. Now, that magic number has been achieved in one year. The final tally for 2011 was actually 1,217,847 hits, as measured by total page views. This compares with 729,000 in 2010 and 339,000 in 2009.
I guess people like what they see on ElvisBlog because the number of readers keeps growing. Thanks so much for all your support.
Phil Arnold, Original Elvis Blogmeister
Posted in ELVISBLOG NEWS, Main Page
No Post Last Weekend:
Since I started ElvisBlog back in 2005, I have tried to consistently post a new article each weekend. Blog tutorials all declared that a regular schedule was necessary to keep readers happy and coming back. During the first six years, the only time I missed a post was when my wife had open-heart surgery in 2009. Well, now it has happened twice. A rogue virus got into my laptop and screwed up everything. It took two trips to the Geek Squad at Best Buys and $280 to get it fixed, and I was without my laptop for ten days. So, I’m real sorry if you checked into ElvisBlog recently and found nothing new, but now you know the reason.
Two Million Hits:
Last April I was happy to announce that ElvisBlog had reached one million hits (total page views). It took five years and two months to reach that level. Now, twelve months later, ElvisBlog has passed two million hits. Thanks to all you readers for making this happen. I appreciate your support.
New Logo, Tag Line and Banner:
Over the years, there have been numerous references in ElvisBlog to the famous Elvis lip curl. One article last February showed several artists’ interpretations of the Elvis snarl, and that got me fascinated with the image. So, I utilized the considerable talents of graphic designer Carol Stephens to come up a really distinctive Elvis lip curl. She did such a terrific job I decided to use it as a logo for Elvisblog.
At the same time, I have been considering changing the tag-line for the blog. The original “A Weekly Column of News, History and Commentary about Elvis Presley” seemed too stuffy. The subjects of my posts have trended more to the fun side, celebrating Elvis as a pop culture icon. So, I decided a better tag-line would be: “All the Cool Stuff Out There in Elvis World.”
With both a new logo and a new tag-line, it was time to change the banner at the top of the ElvisBlog home page. This is the first time it has appeared, and I hope you like it.
Phil Arnold, Original Elvis Blogmeister
Posted in ELVISBLOG NEWS, Main Page
One Million Hits:
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I haven’t done any ElvisBlog News articles since April last year. It seemed like it was just a vehicle for bragging, so I backed off until there was something really big to report.
Well, now there is.
ElvisBlog recently passed 1,000,000 total hits since its start back in February 2005. Readership growth each year has been excellent and shows no signs of leveling off. New Elvis fans continue to discover ElvisBlog and must like it, because they are coming back as regular readers.
As I explained in the last News, the hits count is based on what my blogware shows as Total Page Views. I believe this is how other sites measure hits, as well. Elvisblog has passed the 45,000 page views per month level, so the 2 million mark should be reached before the end of next year.
I recently discovered two websites that can tell you how your site ranks compared to all of them out there on the internet. I typed in the ElvisBlog URL, and the results were very gratifying. www.sitelogr.com says ElvisBlog ranks #568,016in the world. www.siteluck.com tallies it at #589,678. That may not sound so good until you consider how many websites there are worldwide. SiteLuck.com displays a list of recent searches, and one website was #24,000,000 + on the list. So, ElvisBlog must be in the top 2 or 3 % in the world. I’ll take that.
Thanks to all you readers for your continued support.
Phil Arnold
Original Elvis Blogmeister: ElvisBlog
www.ElvisBlog.net
Posted in ELVISBLOG NEWS, Main Page
On January 30, 2005, the first blog devoted to Elvis made its debut. Five years and 800,000 hits later, ElvisBlog rolls on. There have been many changes, so it’s fun to go back and look at the first three articles that started things off. My original concept was for the weekly posts to contain 200 words or so, but today word counts of 800 to 1000 are common. For the first two years, there were no photos or pictures to illustrate the columns. Today, there are 8 or 10 in each, and many get picked up by Google Images and bring more new readers to ElvisBlog. Let’s look at those first three, very basic blog articles.
Elvis Jukebox Rankings – 1/30/05:
Back in 1989, on the 100th anniversary of the jukebox, the Amusement & Music Operators Association published a list of the top jukebox hits of all time. Elvis’ two-sided hit “Hound dog/Don’t Be Cruel” came in third. This premier ElvisBlog article racked up a grand total of six hits the entire first month of the blog’s history.
Riley Keough Presley? – 2/6/05:
When Elvis’ fifteen-year-old granddaughter started her modeling career in 2005, she was listed in press releases as Riley Keough Presley, not her given name of Danielle Riley Keough. I wondered if she might be using the Presley name to advance her career, but now, five years later, she is all over the press and the internet, and everyone refers to her as Riley Keough. She is to be congratulated for achieving quite a bit on her own. This ElvisBlog article ranked as the most popular for the next 54 weeks after it was posted.
Riley Keough in 2005
The Guitar that Rocked the World – 2/13/05:
I was so happy for Scotty Moore when I wrote this article. He was finally going to be honored with a TV special filmed at the famed Abbey Road Studios in London. Unfortunately, Scotty was far too trusting of the European producers of the project, and little turned out as promised. Instead of a TV special titled The Guitar That Changed the World, what resulted was a DVD titled A Tribute to the King. Click here to read more detail about what happened. Scotty Moore has now been the topic of seven ElvisBlog columns over the years. I really like this man.
© 2010 Philip R Arnold, Original Elvis Blogmeister All Rights Reserved www.ElvisBlog.net
Elvis, Elvis Presley, and Graceland are registered trademarks of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.
Posted in ELVISBLOG NEWS, HISTORY, Main Page
ElvisBlog Mini-Nuggets #19
We haven’t done Mini-Nuggets since March 2014, but Elvis’ 80th birthday has provided some short subjects to report.
Record Number of Hits for ElvisBlog:
On January 1, I checked Google Analytics to see how well ElvisBlog did for the year. 147,000 people (users) visited the site, resulting in 279,991 pageviews (hits). That’s an average of 2,800 users a week, a gain of 30% over the 2013 results. Definitely a good year.
Which makes the results in the graphic above even more remarkable. Yesterday, on what would have been Elvis’ 80th birthday, ElvisBlog had nearly 2,600 people visit the site. Wow. I hope I’m still around to see the results on Elvis’ 100th birthday.
Elvis’ Movie Costars Pass Away:
When time permits, we will take a deeper look at two late actresses who appeared with films with Elvis. Mary Ann Mobley (Girl Happy, Harum Scarum) died on December 19, 2014.
Donna Douglas (Frankie and Johnny) passed away on New Year’s Day, 2015.
Elvis’ leading ladies have been a staple for print and video interviews about him for decades. Has there ever been an Elvis Week without one or two of them being “Special Guests” for talks, panel discussions, and autograph sessions?
Well, the list is getting short, and you have to wonder what authors, journalists and EPE will do when Elvis’ female costars are all gone. Now we have a hint. In celebration of Elvis 80th birthday, an article in the Boone, NC Mountain Times featured an interview with Donna Butterworth who was ten-years-old when she appeared with Elvis in Paradise, Hawaiian Style. You are going to see more of this.
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Peanut Butter ‘N Banana Ice Cream:
I received an email from the PR firm representing Baskin-Robbins telling me about their new flavor to celebrate Elvis’ 80th Birthday. It will be available for the entire month of January, and it is described as banana-flavored ice cream with a chunky peanut butter ribbon. They are sending me two $31 gift cards – one to use to sample it and write a review. I expect to like it, but I did have a bad experience at Elvis Week 2007 when I tried peanut butter and banana coffee, and it was lame.
The other gift card will be offered as the prize in an Elvis Caption Contest which I will post in a couple of days.
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The Elvis Auction at Graceland:
The auction last night was a huge success, highlighted by the 1953 acetate of Elvis’ first recorded songs “My Happiness”/”That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.” The pre-auction estimate was for $75-100,000, but it went for $300,000! That’s got to be the highest priced record ever. Let’s see a record by Michael Jackson, or the Beatles, or Mariah Carey top that.
There were 67 items up for auction, so it will take two or three blogs to cover all the interesting elements of this Elvis 80th birthday event, and I’ll get them posted as soon as possible.
© 2014 Philip R Arnold, Original Elvis Blogmeister All Rights Reserved www.ElvisBlog.net
Elvis, Elvis Presley, and Graceland are registered trademarks of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.
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Posted in AUCTIONS / MEMORABILIA, ELVIS COMMENTARY MINI-NUGGETS, ELVISBLOG NEWS, HOLIDAY GREETINGS TO ELVIS, NEWS, PRODUCTS BASED ON ELVIS
Tagged Auction at Graceland, Donna Douglas, Elvis auctions, Google Analytics, Mary Ann Mobley, Peanut Butter and Banana