Terra Extraneus

Terra Extraneus is one month old today. I believe Rod Heggy will agree that our first month of blogging has surpassed our expectations by every measure.

Our original plan was to put TerraX out there but keep it our little secret while we spent the first month or two getting it to look they way we want it to, and building some content. We imagined that nobody would know about it until we took some intentional steps to promote traffic. However, Rod put up our first post, on the topic of intelligent design, and less than two hours after Terra Extraneus went public, we had our first visitor and our first comment. It’s been that way ever since.

So far we have done nothing to promote TerraX, but the world has somehow found out about us. We have had readers from Brazil, Canada, England, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Australia, Japan, and China – and a majority of the 50 states. Someone from the Palestinian Territory read a post of mine in which I respond to Pat Robertson’s comments about Israel, and a couple of days later I received an invitation to participate in an online discussion group of Palestinian Christians. TerraX has given Rod and I instant access to people literally all over the world. Amazing.

During our first month, we have had 311 visitors. (Our tracking software counts a visit as any number of page views by the same visitor with no more than 30 minutes between page views. In other words, if you come to our site and stay for several hours, that’s one visit. If you leave our site and come back an hour later, that’s two visits). That computes to an average of 13 readers a day, almost 100 a week. Rod and I have posted a total of 47 articles, and 11 readers have posted comments in response.

One measure of success that the top hitters in the blogosphere watch is links — how many other websites and blogsites link back to something we have posted on our blog. That has happened one time, when a pastor in California referred the readers of his blog to our review of George Barna’s book, Revolution.

How have people found us? One way is through search engines. The single biggest draw has been our review of Barna’s book. That has brought dozens of people from all over the world to our site. Another significant draw have been searches on the movies we have reviewed or commented on. Regarding many visitors, we don’t have a clue what brought them our way.

Terra Extraneus is still far from what we envision it becoming. If we had our way, TerraX would still be our little secret, in the pre-launch stage. But the world and the Internet haven’t cooperated with that plan, so we are hurrying to make many of the improvements we have in mind during the coming weeks.

If you are reading this, you are probably one of those 311 readers who came to visit during our first month. Thanks very much for taking an interest. From the start, Rod and I have imagined Terra Extraneus as a conversation — not just with each other, but with you. We welcome any suggestions you have.

If you are visiting TerraX for the first time, welcome to the conversation. It’s a strange world, but together, maybe we can make some sense out of it.

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UPDATE (Jan. 31, 2006): Visitors participating in the Commonwealth essay competition, please see this special message just for you: “Every Secret Will Be Made Known.”