So my longtime friend (and the unintentional instigator of this blog) and I had a conversation yesterday about hits to our blogs. More precisely we talked about all the hits he gets and the fact that I get almost none. He shared his secret, which I will divulge by way of example.
When this man died some time ago, I blogged about it within hours, and… nothing. I got barely a blip in my stats for that day. I didn’t notice this until five days later when I actually checked my hit count, which I accidentally clicked on in an attempt to see what was caught in the spam filter. I saw an uptick in hits on the graph for that particular day so I went back and looked at what I had posted. Voila.
Will, who checks his hit count at a rate roughly equivalent to the speed of movie film through a projector, saw that he was getting referrals from search terms such as the decedent’s name and ‘Christian’. So he put together this post, which as you can see says almost nothing at all in answer to the question it poses.
Not only did this post get him thousands of hits, it also netted him a slew of regular readers. Through repeating this practice many times over, he now gets a thousand hits a day and I get a hundred (on a good day). If I post something with a technical title such as, oh I don’t know, ‘Microsoft Acquires Apple’ I get a bit more.
Don’t worry though, I’m not a slave to my stat counter. I’m not about to start coming up start titling my posts with suggestive phrases “Cure For Cancer Finally Found” or “Jobs Announces 200G iPod” or even “Midnight Rendezvous Proves Fatal For Official.” I won’t sell out like that. Not me.
