I can’t believe I did that. It’s sort of like forgetting your child’s birthday. Well, not really. Actually, I do know how I let it slip by. I have been pretty busy at work and also, my wife has found a very compelling web site (for her, anyway) that leaves very little computer slack time available. Maybe the 20 minutes right before and after dinner, that’s about it.
Anyway, it’s been two years. Two very long, shortish years… Lots to complain about, lots of rather interesting pictures. I think I have done several pretty good posts. (See “Fav Posts” in the column on the right, if you are at all intrigued.) A couple of my posts actually even come up as Number 1 in the search list on Yahoo or Google, just so long as you type in the EXACT words necessary…
Based on my experience over the last two years, and also with installing SiteMeter, here are my secrets to having a number of people drop by your web site on a daily basis:
1. A blog title that includes the word “rabbits” and a post by the name of “enemies”. That’s a guarantee of at least four or five hits a day from people scouring the web to see what kind of nasty creatures out there prey on poor defenseless bunnies.
2. A post that contains a picture of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Very popular, indeed.
3. Don’t play cute with titles of the posts, like one called “Oops!” Say, instead, exactly what the post is about so that any searches will come up with yours as a possibility. Like for example, that one should have been called “Airbus A340 smashes into wall at Toulouse, France prior to delivery to Eithad Airlines.” That probably would have come up with a lot more hits on search engines than “Oops!”.
4. Include quotations from popular movies (like “Star Wars”) and television shows (like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). Those will get picked up in by a search engine.
5. Pictures of Audrey Hepburn are always nice.
6. Ditto, pictures of Shih-Tzu puppies.
7. Ditto, any really interesting photos like art from piles of trash, art from Legos, art from chalk drawings on sidewalks. Unusual photos are apparently MUCH more compelling than anything I have to say.
Actually, I find it amazing that I have kept this up for over two years now. I actually find this medium pretty interesting. You can do or say pretty much anything you want, and you have absolutely no idea what kind of audience you might get. If you just leave it to chance, then you might get no traffic at all or you might get a lot more than you expected. It is purely up to the worldwide audience (and I do mean, worldwide) to determine if your material is worth more than a 10 second glance. If you aren’t in this for the money or personal ego-gratification, then this is a pretty fun thing to do. Just toss whatever you think might be of interest to someone else out there and see what happens. It’s like fishing in a REALLY big lake. You know there are fish out there, but you aren’t sure exactly what would attract them. You keep tossing your bait out there until you find the right combination.
I wonder why I came up with that particular analogy. I don’t fish.
So, here’s to the last two years spent blogging. My only wish, and it is a fervent one, is that I have LOTS less to complain about come November.
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