How To Get Hits Redux...
Yeah, so this month I've broken my previous personal weblog records with more than 65k viewers and 1.75 million hits. That's not too bad. I've served up 56GB of data - about four times the norm - because of the John Stewart MP3 as well. This hardly puts me into the A-List of webloggers out there, but is fun to tell people "yeah, about 12,000 people a day read my weblog"
In the past couple days alone I've added thousands of viewers. Most of them arriving in some sort of righteous rage or state of annoyance. As Diego put it to me via IM this morning: I have "knack for polemics." Interesting. I'm just writing what I think and people lose their mind.
But here's some general tips for traffic: Take on Apple. Writing something bad about Steve Jobs or a new Apple product is the sure-fire way to get the zealots in a state of fury. Two days later and I've got 2000+ individual people visiting that post about the iPod photo, over 52 comments and lots of emails. This is to be expected of course, but of the two or three times that I've done it and gotten such a response, it still surprises me.
It seems that Google is on that list as well. My post yesterday is creating lots of links and comments. Lots of Junior Psychoanalysis, which is always a joy to read, and lots of self-justifying opinions. I don't write things here to cause controversy, believe me, I just rant. Some stuff never gets noticed, and other stuff gets amazing reactions. It's still incredible to me the amount of consternation something like yesterday's post can cause. Blowing off any other interview would cause *zero* notice. Mention Google and bam, I'm the poster boy for bad decisions.
Reality check: I'm sitting at home in my boxers posting to my weblog on a Friday at 11 a.m. - there's not a lot of reason to get uptight about what I write here.
Thirdly, the other stuff outside the technology industry is pretty damn popular. In just a few days the JonStewart MP3 I posted was downloaded more than 10,000 times. iFilm has shown the video, what, over a million times? (Pretty great if you forget the fact that the original broadcast was seen by at least that many people in one shot. The Internet is cool, but mainstream media is still soooo much bigger, no?) Yeah, anyways I think if you can tap into that sort of content a bit more you'd probably get a lot more readers pretty quick I think. Probably why the WarBloggers get so much traffic. There's a lot more people interested in that sort of stuff than geek stuff.
And finally, porn. Porn is good for lots of downloads. Not that I'd know, but I'm just assuming based on what I've read lately. 'Nuff said about that,really.
;-)
-Russ