New Record for May

I predicted that in May Pico's Cycling - Tales of the Road would break its one month readership record. We'll the Blogger month ends in a few minutes and I will be able to tell you the final tally before I finish writing this post.

Friday morning when I got up to start my day we were just seven page views short of February's record of 1541. I confidently tweeted that the record was going to fall that day. At noon I checked again and we were still four short. That was not what I expected to see. After three o'clock I checked again and we were still three short. For crying out loud it was teasing me. I went outside and took Wesley for a walk. A watched pot never boils and I had no intention of torturing myself. While we were out walking, Francine and the gang arrived home with the groceries, we helped bring everything in. Finished with that I decided to take another quick peak. Boom - we were already forty-five views into new territory. Part of me was starting to worry it would all stall right there.

The new record is 1874 page views. A new month has begun and hopefully we will continue to show consistent growth.

Lesson Learned and Other Schtuff

The past couple weeks have taught me one thing that is encouraging about promoting my own writing. The articles listed at the end of each post like I'm doing today do make a difference. A percentage of my readers will click the links and keep reading. On my Pico's Cycling - Tales of the Road site I see regular referrals coming from my site here. That means that I will be adding that to everything from here on out. I will try to keep it related to the subject at hand but this is my site so I can advertise whatever I feel like.

Picture above is from my wife Francine's artwork. Why on earth would I use that on my author's blog is quite simple. She works hard at painting pictures while I work hard at writing. Both of us would like to see additional income from those sources. Those article ads at the bottom could include things like links to her website. I've always wanted to be able to do articles to promote the efforts of some of my friends and family members. With the blogs I have, I have the platforms to do exactly that if I have the time. Several family members and friends are artists. I also have a lot of writer friends. I just my write something to promote them.

This is one of the big advantages of running your own site as opposed to writing on hosted platforms like Hubpages and others. I will continue to write for them but if I have something that doesn't fit. No problem.

Anyway, I had a rough week financially and it has been draining. After all that we have a new vehicle and I hope I'm still coherent.

More From Pico and Friends

The Three Towers of Evil

This was originally written on Bubblews as a serial. I thought it was good enough to post over to Hubpages once I'd recovered all the posts from Bubblews. The greatest thing here is that you won't have to go searching for all the pieces of the story. It has not been promoted on this platform previously.

Francine's Art

To the left is Francine's latest completed work. She is working on another painting which I think is going to be her best to date. She has been registered on this site for quite some time. Pictures can be ordered as prints, greeting cards and even pillow cases. She is willing to part with some of the originals but not through this site.

Pico's Cycling - Tales of the Road

Our May issue is poised to be a record breaking month. We are on pace to set a monthly readership record. It is a great issue. For the first time it looks like we'll have all five articles top one hundred individual views. Go on and have a look. If you enjoy cycling, you'll love reading our stories and browsing our content.

Pico's Cycling Top Five Articles of 2014

I wrote a post highlighting our top five posts all time recently and I thought I'd follow it up with a post highlighting the top five posts from last year. Won't doing a similar post for awhile because there were only five articles in 2013 and that would be pointless.

I actually had to go and research this because I didn't know what the top articles were outside of the top two for last year and they weren't in the order I expected. Interesting to note is that outside of the first two these have very ordinary readership numbers when you compare them to this year. Just a sign of how much we have grown since last year.

Without further ado. Here they are from the top:

The Kindness of Strangers: A Safe Place to Sleep

Our most popular article was this reprint from Nancy Sathre-Vogel. A great article. We no longer do reprints because Google punishes the site's ranking for that. Kind of a bummer because there were several others that would have been appropriate. Hopefully someday she'll have time to write an original article for us.

Iohan Interview

Jack Hawkin's interview with Iohan was a very close second in page views. This year we've featured Iohan in two other articles. They have both done exceptionally well. No surprise if you take the time to watch one of his trip videos. I personally really enjoyed watching them and look forward to his future adventures.

Dressing Up the Moncton Maniac

At least something I wrote ranked as high as number three for the year. This article shows in unflattering glory how I dress for different kinds of cycling weather, from rain to snow. My motto is: All season, all weather, all the time. Since riding like this and writing about it, I have seen someone else who dresses up almost exactly like me riding in Moncton. Whoo hoo! I'm a trend setter.

Rattlesnake Point

Fourth and fifth place were tied. This is the story or a group tour I planned and led as a tune up for something bigger and better. One of the more successful tours I've participated in. Touring stories are intended to be the lifeblood of this publication.

Building An All Weather Commuter

Last but not least is an article describing how I turned my very ordinary bicycle into an all weather commuting bike. This is the bike that took me to work and anywhere else I needed to go no matter what the weather was like. The bike still exists. Needs a little work but it will be doing my trips this riding season.

If you enjoyed these articles, be sure to like our Facebook Page or following @Picoscycling on Twitter. That way you'll get notifications for everything we publish and won't risk missing any. Happy cycling.

Old Writing

Been working slowly but surely over the past couple weeks closing up shop over at Bubblews. My balance is over thirty five dollars over there but I seriously doubt I'll ever make up the between fourteen and fifteen dollars needed to hit the redemption amount. I don't think they'll ever lower that number because too many people like me will just take the money and run. There's no advantage to them to do that. My intention is to harvest everything of value and then abandon the account.

I had written in excess of five hundred posts there. I am slowly deleting them one by one. It is taking longer than I expected because there is more of value there than I thought. I expected to pull maybe a dozen or so posts that could be worked into articles out of the junk pile. Under estimated myself. As I go through them I'm finding that about fifteen percent is worth keeping. It might end up being even higher than that. The material will reappear on my blogs or on Hubpages. 

This is one of the reasons I established the Pico's Writing Practice blog. A lot of my writing practice does deserve to be forgotten but there is a surprising amount of usable material produced. Once I've moved a few things off my plate I expect to be more active on that blog. I should be producing work daily and while I do pretty well considering my schedule and time constraints, I want to do better consistently.

Pico's Cycling All Time Top Five Articles

We have grown so fast at the beginning of this year that all five most popular articles are from the current year. Jack Hawkins my fellow cycling writer usually does well and claims the top spot overall but the other four are all written by yours truly.

1) I Want to See the World is a story from Iohan Gueorguiev who is riding from north of the arctic circle to Argentina. This covers the first leg of his adventure. Included in the article is a link to Iohan's youtube video. He records himself with a selfie stick and narrates as he goes. I'm impressed with the steadiness of the pictures. The quality is outstanding. The trip itself is incredible.

2) It Begins is the first instalment of my own solo long distance self contained cycling adventure. The story is continued in successive issues of the webzine but none of them have attained to the popularity of the beginning.

3) Choosing a Touring Tent surprised me. I honestly didn't expect this very basic article to get this much attention. Evidently there are a lot of people looking for a little advice on getting this type of equipment.

4) Cycling in Bear Country I think is a very useful practical article and again was surprised at the amount of interest. Whether people are just curious or really would like to know about cycling in that kind of environment is not something I can answer.

5) Family Versus the Dog Kind rounds out my current top five. I expected this one to do well because I haven't met too many cyclists that have not had a run in with some other man's best friend. Sometimes I can actually predict what people will read. Most of the time though I can't.

I'm hoping to have continued success and maybe even see some of these supplanted in the future. At some point I may write a post listing our top five from 2014. Maybe before the end of the month. We'll see how my time goes.

The title of each article in the list here is a link to the article itself. If you haven't read them yet, that what they're published for - enjoy.