Blog Archives
The Tush Push — Everything you didn’t know you wanted to know.
Three Articles out of One:
Recently Google burped. And the whole Internet Community freaked out.
Seriously! It is kind of like the punch line from that old joke:
Q: Where does a 500 lb gorilla sit?
A: Wherever it wants!
The fact of the matter is that Google is the biggest most powerful search engine for the Internet on the Planet. And when Google changes how it calculates page rank, hundreds of thousands of very smart people go to work trying to figure out why their web pages are no longer ranking high and they try to figure out how to get their pages to rank high again!
I write online at Squidoo.com and the folks at Squidoo do all that “figuring out” bit for me. Over the past few months, Squidoo has been changing things up a LOT! All in an effort to regain the lost ground from Google’s last ranking system change.
I’ve actually been very lucky. Most of the changes at Squidoo have not affected any of my lenses. None of my lenses were caught by Squidoo’s new rules designed to weed out spammers and retain only original creative content.
In fact my lenses were moving up in rank and getting paid more as Squidoo weeded out all the garbage lenses. Woo Hoo!
Well at least until Read the rest of this entry
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Changing up how I report on the Top Ten Line Dances
There is just not enough time in the day…
Keeping track of the Top Ten Line Dance Reporting lists takes time. Lots of it. You’d be horrified about how much time it takes. So I decided to change from reporting on the Top from Weekly to Monthly.
Up to now, I’ve had a detailed page where I put the Top Ten Dances from each site:
- Copperknob
- Kickit
- World Line Dance Newsletter
- LineDancer Magazine
On each of these detailed pages I had, for each dance:
- The dance’s current rank #1, #2, #3, etc
- An indicator of whether the dance was moving up or down the list
- Details about the dance, like count, # of restarts & tags, difficulty level, etc.
- The name of the dance and the name of the choreographer
- Link to a stepsheet for the dance
- Link to the music on Amazon.
- Link to the music on iTunes
- And embedded videos of the dance, both demonstrations and teaches
Then I had two “summary / review” lists which I created myself:
- TxCowboyDancer’s Weekly Summary – which basically listed the Top Ten dances as a simple list and then had a link to the more detailed page.
- TxCowboyDancer’s Weekly Review — a kind of Best of the Best “Most Popular” which listed only those dances which appeared on at least two of the four websites.
Whew! I’m getting tire just listing it. The “Weekly Summary” didn’t take that long, but the detailed page. OMG!
So… I’m keeping the “Weekly Summary” but I’m switching the detailed page to a monthly report instead of week.
Here’s what I’m doing. I’m keeping track of the dances for each week during a given month. Then I use some statistical magic and list only the top ten dances for the whole month. In other words, only the VERY MOST POPULAR dances make the top ten for the month.
Which means [drum roll please] I save time and you, dearest readers also save time. Why? Because instead of learning a potential of 40+ dances per month… you can look at my Monthly survey and learn only the top 10. Woot! Uh-huh! Doing a happy “chair dance”!
Coo huh?
So.. Here is my very first one that I’m unveiling —
The Top Ten Line Dances from CopperKnob for the month ending Sept 21, 2013:
Enjoy! See ya on the dance floor!
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TxCowboyDancer’s Weekly Line Dance Review posted for this week.
There Are a Lot of Line Dance Lists!
There are lots of places on the Web that track the “Top Ten” line dances on a weekly or monthly basis.
And every single one of the darn tootin’ thangs seem to have a different way of calculating just which dances are the top ten.
sigh
It’s enough to make one’s inner domestic diva want to take off her tiara and eat bon bons!
Never fear, dearest readers, all twelve of you who actually read this blog… I, the awesome, the fantastic, the studly, being the kind, generous, friendly, charming person that I am have set out to make sense out of that muddle of mish-mashy information and simply for you. Can I have an amen?!
Ok, so, what I’ve done, is create two articles on Squidoo:
TxCowboyDancer’s Weekly Summary of Top Ten Line Dance Lists
What you’ll find on this page is a summary of all the Top Ten Lists that of which I keep track. You’ll find a simple straight forward listing of the “Top Ten” dances from each list along with a link to the full list for that website. Here is the blurb from the beginning of the the Review:
Welcome to TxCowboyDancer’s Weekly Report of the Top Line Dances from ranking sites around the world.
Keeping track of all those line dances is a lot like Herding Cats which is why I created this summary page to make life a bit easier! (And why there is a photo of a cute Cowboy KItty. 🙂
Those wanting more information can follow the links to visit a “Detailed Report” for each site containing the “Top Ten” dances, links to the stepsheets, demo & walk-through videos, and the music for each dance.
TxCowboyDancer’s Best of the Best: The Hottest Line Dances in the World
For those folks who don’t even want to deal with the summary page in the List Review, I’ve created a page where I only list those dances appearing on multiple websites. Here is the blurb from the beginning of the artilce.
I monitor several line dance survey lists from different websites:
1. World Line Dance Newsletter
2. LineDancer Magazine
3. CopperKnob Line Dance Archive
4. Kickit Line Dance ArchiveThe following dances are ones which appear in the “Top Ten” lists on at least two of the four websites listed above, making them the most popular line dances on the planet!
HOTTEST — On all Four List
HOTTER — On Three of the Four Lists
HOT — On Two of the Four Lists
[Check out the dances listed in the article...]
So, there you have it, I hope you enjoy my two summary lists.
See ya on the Dance Floor!
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I broke into Tier 1 with ‘What is the Best Song to use for the Tush Push Line Dance?’
Note (added on 07.01.2015) — This blog post was written when I was writing on a website called “Squiddo.” The stats all refer to the article as it appeared over on that site. The website no longer exists. I’m leaving this here because, well I’m proud of those stats.
The good news is that I’m in the process of re-creating the articles I had on Squidoo here on my blog. So here are three Tush Push articles for you to enjoy:
or if you want to read the old blog post keep scrolling… 🙂
I Finally Have a Tier 1 Article!
I would never have thought that THIS article would be the one that shot up into Teir 1.
But it has. Who knew!
That is thanks in part mainly to the readers of Carol’s World Line Dance Newsletter.
She was kind enough to post a link to the article in the Newsletter and her readers have pushed my article up to the very top of the charts on Squidoo.
Today’s Stats / Rankings:
Ranked #1,045 overall
Ranked #50 in Entertainment
Ranked #2 in Entertainment >> Dance
Ranked #1 in Entertainment >> Dance >> Other Dance Topics
There have been 430 visits to the page since I first published it on May 3rd. Wow! If every one of the people who follow my blog, my facebook page, twitter, etc, would go and visit the the article then hit all the social “share” and “like” buttons, I think I would swoon with excitement.
If you’ve never seen a 299 lb hairy man swoon, believe me it is quite a sight. Then I would need, of course to fortify myself with a Mint Julip! LOL
CHALLENGE!!!! — IF the total number of hits goes from 430 to 700 by 10pm CST on Friday, I will upload a video to Youtube of me SWOONING! That means that 270 of my 800 friends and followers want to see me make a clown of myself in public to go to the article and do the whole “clicky-clicky” thing (and maybe take some polls and leave comments? [inserting pitiful hopeful look]
Excerpt from the introduction of my “Tush Push” article:
Among line dancers, there is one dance that reigns supreme: The Tush Push. This dance has been around since the very earliest days of the period where “line dances” became formally recognized as a separate and distinct dance genre.
Learning the Tush Push is a rite of passage for new line dancers. Having learned it, you are no longer a person who does a line dance on occasion at parties or weddings, you have become a “line dancer.” 🙂
Because the Tush Push has been around for, literally, decades, and because of the way the dance is structured, the dance can be danced to hundreds, if not thousands of songs.
Below you will see some fun polls, some cool photos, a bit-o-drama, and a list some music to which the Tush Push can be danced. VOTE for your favorite and if you don’t see your favorite, don’t be shy, let me know about it and…
[Read the rest of the article ]
See ya on the dance floor!
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Line Dance Levels Explained, Defined and Demystified!
What are Line Dance Levels?
Asking “What are line dance levels?” feels a wee bit silly doesn’t it? I know that I felt a little strange asking the question. I mean, after all, the whole idea of “Beginner – Intermediate – Advanced” is a concept that most of us “get” right away.
It isn’t a silly question, of course.
Even though most of us can easily grasp the concept of a ranking system which starts with…
…“so easy a baby could do it…”
…moves through “kinda in the middle someplace”…
…and ends up at “you have GOT to be kidding me!”…it is not easy to figure out exactly which dance goes where. It is quite a mess in fact! No wonder folks get confused!
Fear not fellow dancer, by the end of this short article you’ll be able to skim the workshop list at a dance event and decide with confidence which ones are right for you.
What most folks are really asking when they say “What are “Line Dance Levels?” is for more detail so they can then be able to sort the dances into their proper levels.
To put it another way, what people are asking is: “Where are the dividing lines between the levels and what steps are in each level?
Dance on my friend! Dance on!
Worlds 2013 – Advanced Line Dance Male and Female divisions on the floor — I’m the guy in black in the front
This is an article that has been on my “To do” list for quite a while. And I finally got around to it. Because I’ve been line dancing quite a while, I have a pretty good grasp of what the levels are, however, as I’ve started teaching line dance, I’ve discovered that for many people the levels are confusing.
So this article is an attempt to sort it all out. I think it is pretty well written, but then I’m kinda biased. LOL Hmmm I wonder if I could get the judges at dance comps to let me judge myself? wink
Anyway, the article explains about the different “levels” that choreographers assign to their line dances, and talks about how you can, uhhmmmm, judge for yourself whether or not something is really a “beginner” or if the dance should actually be called an “improver” or “intermediate”
As with all my articles I write, there is a wee bit of humor thrown in just for giggles and grins, some cool photos of folks dancing, and some fun polls. I hope you enjoy it.
[ Read the rest of the article ]
5-6-7-8 Dancing My Way to a Healthy Me! 