Dirty Coal statistic of the day

For those of us who are particularly eager to see the new wave of EVs hit the streets, pretty much every public statement about the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt, or the Coda ignites a great deal of interest. We are enthusiasts and we pretty much hang on every word that feeds are our need for more and better information.  But what about the rest of the world?  Are they paying attention?  Does anyone else - outside this band of true believers - really care?

GM's price announcement spiked search interest in the Chevy Volt

Over at Run on Sun we now have some empirical evidence that they do.  Run on Sun is a solar power system installer in Pasadena, California.  Our interest in EVs has lead us to begin marketing to that segment of the market that visits websites like SolarChargedDriving.  One part of that is a web page specifically devoted to these new vehicles with pictures and information about how you might size a solar power system to fully recharge them from a day’s solar energy.  To drive visitors to those pages, we also created an Adwords campaign with ads related to each of the EVs featured on our page. Generally speaking, this is a very low volume ad campaign with maybe a couple of hundred impressions and a click or so on any given day.

That all changed this week when GM made its long awaited announcement regarding the price of its Chevy Volt.  As you can see from our graphic on the right, our impressions went up by more than a factor of 16 with five times as many clicks as the day before.  Interest continued strong into the next day as well, before subsiding to more typical levels.  Because our ad campaign is very geographically focused, we know that all of those searches came from our immediate service area in the greater Los Angeles basin.

Aside from providing gratification in seeing our advance planning pay off in lots of impressions for our ad thanks to GM’s PR efforts, how does this matter?  Well, it certainly suggests that we are not the only ones eager for significant information about this new generation of EVs. For those of us actively trying to make the PV-EV connection a reality, this is an important milestone in our education efforts.  The general public is not yet where the regular visitors to this site are - they are yet to be convinced that an EV will work for them or that they could make it Run on Sun.  But they are curious and they are starting to pay attention. It is up to us to fill their need for reliable, un-hyped information that they can use to become informed, and ultimately enthusiasts themselves.

SolarChargedDriving.Com is looking to build a dynamic and vibrant community of bloggers interested in writing and riffing about solar energy, EVs/PHEVs, the environment, and, of course, the revolutionary synergy between solar energy and EVs/PHEVs.

Please consider creating a blog and helping us grow SolarChargedDriving.Com and, more importantly, excitement about solar energy, environmentalism and the ways in which the solar and EV/PHEV synergy can help create a greener, cleaner world!

Creating a blog and starting to blog are easy.

For directions on how to do this, check out our “How to start a blog” entry under the Sample and Tutorial Blog.

Below is a step-by-step explanation of how to create your own SolarChargedDriving.Com blog. You may wish to copy and paste these into a Word or Notepad file and print them out before you start.

1. Click on the “Create an account” link in the “Community login” navigation bar at the top left of the page.
2. Fill out all the required fields on the “Registration” page: Name, Username,E-mail,  Password, Verify Password.
3. Click on the “Register” button.
4. Go to your e-mail account.
5. Click on the activation link in the e-mail that you have received from SolarChargedDriving.Com.
6. You will be taken to a page that says “Activation Complete”
7. Log in to SolarChargedDriving.Com using the “Community Login” Navigation bar.
8. You will be taken to the Sun Miles Community Club Pages.
9. Under the Sun Miles Club link at the top of the page, drag to the “Sun Miles Blogosphere” link.
10. You will be taken to the SolarChargedDriving.Com blogstream, which brings together all the blog entries from all the different blogs at SolarChargedDriving.Com.
11. Click on the “Create a new blog” link right above the first entry in the SolarChargedDriving.Com blogstream.
12. On the next page that appears, you can name your blog and give your blog a title.
13. Click on the “Create blog” button at the bottom of the page.
14. Click on the long URL that has your blog name at the end of it.
15. Click on the small  “Edit” link at the bottom of the “Hello world!” entry.
16. You will be taken to a WordPress dashboard in which you can edit that entry and create new entries.
17. If you are not familiar with how to use WordPress, please check out the set of links to video tutorials on WordPress posted under the “How to start your own blog: Part II” entry.
18. When you return to SolarChargedDriving to blog again after leaving, you must: a) log in using the Community login navigation bar; b) navigate to –>Sun Miles Club –> Sun Miles Blogosphere –>My blog dashboard (this will appear as the final drop down menu).
19. Start blogging again!

Below is a list of video tutorials on Wordpress available at Wordpress.tv.

• An overview of the Dashboard
• How do I write and publish a post in my blog?
• How do I save a draft?
• How can I add an About Me page?
• Widgets overview?
• How can I add a widget to my sidebar?
• How do I add a link to my sidebar?
• How can I edit the links on my sidebar?
• How do I add categories and tags to my posts?
• How can I add photos and videos to my blog?
• How can I add a YouTube Video to my post?
• How can I add or delete categories on my blog?