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How to get more hits on your blog
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By Smotlock, our favourite net-savvy mookyduke
Smotlock is not a girl geek. He is clearly a boy (look, he has a beard) but that has never stopped him from exploring words and becoming king of his own internet kingdom. Smotlock gives you the cardinal rules for building your blog into a worshipped power zone. With great power comes great responsibility.
Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm Smotlock. I am a huge asshole and former popular blogger on a site called Journalspace. I'm a jerk you'd never want to meet in real life. And yet I've somehow managed to get close to two hundred thousand hits on my blog in roughly two years.
Maybe that qualifies me as more than just your typical egotistical bastard. I guess it makes me appear to be somebody that knows how to get people's attention on the internet. Face it, for every blogger that says they write online because they don't want attention, ten out of ten of them are lying.
No one writes anything with the possibility of an audience because they don't want to be read. The problem for most of people is that they never will be read. And that's where this little piece comes in. I'm here to tell you how to get more hits to your blog. How to get readers. Yes, I am the light.
And if you put more effort into it than I ever did, maybe you'll be able to keep them.
These are the rules.
1) Don't be boring. No one cares what time you got up this morning, or what you had for breakfast or lunch, or what time you took your first shit of the day. No one gives a good goddamn how much you love your boyfriend or your girlfriend or how they keep fucking you over. No one wants to read your chat transcripts. Write about something interesting. Something that you're passionate about. At the same time try and make it something that everyone can relate to. Even if you love butterflies, writing an adoring essay about your butterfly collection using the Latin names of each one to show off your wealth of knowledge is probably not going to be read by anyone. On the opposite end of the spectrum, writing about your first time having anal sex will probably get read. Many, many times. Mostly by me.
2) Check your spelling. You are on a fucking computer. There is no reason why you should not be using Word or some other word processor to compose your journal entries. You may think using lower-case letters at the beginning of sentences which are all divided by an ellipsis is a good idea. You may think it makes you a grammar rebel, a hardcore writer who's revolting against the establishment. What it actually makes for is a shitty read. A mess to look at that very few people will want to get a headache trying to read.
And for the love of all humanity, never use creative spelling. If you are using "dun" for "don't" you don't need to be writing anything. You need to be redoing your third year English class and learning what you didn't learn the first time. And if you are a guy over the age of sixteen using "dun" for "don't" you need to have a bullet in your head. Also, keep the abbreviations to a bare minimum.
3) Stop posting your quiz results. We're well aware that you know how to use HTML to put images on your journal. We're aware that you take a lot of inane quizzes. But here's the thing. No one cares. Now I'm just as guilty of taking those quizzes as the next person. I loved finding out when I took the "Which movie are you?" quiz, that I am Fight Club. The difference in me and a lot other bloggers is until the previous sentence I never shared a single result with any of you. It's not just because I don't know how to use HTML to do this. It's because I genuinely care about my readers. I'm not saying don't ever post your quiz results, because that's how I find out about some of these quizzes. But when I see a journal that is one quiz result after the next one, chances are I'm going to read something else. And so is anyone else who actually wants to read something about you instead of taking self-aggrandizing quizzes.
4) Write what you know. Don't start writing about politics if you don't know the first thing about them. It will show and people will be bored quickly. In fact, don't write about politics at all. They're boring.
5) Be honest. People will appreciate you being honest. Even if they don't agree with what you have to say they'll appreciate your honesty and the fact that you are willing to share it with them at the cost of them laughing at you. Also, never be afraid to be offensive. People like offensive if it's well done and funny.
6) Make fun of yourself. Be self-deprecating. Some of the funniest journal entries I've read are the ones where people aren't afraid to make fun of themselves and tell you stories of their own stupidity. Or their boring ass lives. These sorts of entries are very genuine. You can tell by reading them, even if they're badly written, that they have meaning to someone.
7) Don't be afraid to be arrogant. You should never take yourself too seriously, but at the same time don't be afraid to be a cocky bastard or bitch. People love confidence. They eat it up. If you say anything with enough conviction people are going to think you know what you're talking about. You can sway a lot of folks to your point of view just by saying things in a convincing enough fashion.
8) Don't be an idiot. I realize this one is probably the hardest one for most people. For real, I'm guilty of breaking this rule myself plenty of times. But try to do your best not to be a complete jackass when you write something or everyone is going to call you on it or just dismiss you as a fuckwit.
9) Quit worrying about your blog having a perfect-looking template (aka you are not your fucking template). A lot of blogs have some really bad templates that people have made. You know the ones I'm talking about, where the text is unreadable because of the background. Of course, there are some really fine-looking ones as well. But what I think really matters is the content of your journal. What you've written. If that content sucks, people won't be coming back even if you have the prettiest blog on the planet.
10) Ease up on the poetry. This is really a more personal opinion than anything. I'm sure that a lot of people like reading your poetry. I am not one of them. If I see an online journal with nothing but poetry, you'll be lucky if I read a single entry. Usually, I'll look for some prose and if there is none I'll just read a different journal. If you feel you must write poetry try offsetting it with some scantily clad pics.
11) Add some scantily clad pics to your blog. This is the last ditch effort if you're incapable of doing any of the other things I've suggested. Being objectified may not be cool, but it will get you "readers".
12) Do what you want to do. It's your blog, not mine. If you don't give a damn about people reading it and leaving you comments don't listen to me. Write it for yourself. In fact, even if you do actually follow my advice remember to always write for yourself first and foremost. But keep your audience in mind. Don't scare them away with dribble.
13) Do not have music on your journal. It will piss me off and everyone else too. We have our own music that we are listening to. If you have music on your journal, you will go to hell when you die.
14) Self promote. This rule is more important than all of the rest, except for the fact that if you don't follow most of my other rules, people won't come back. But if you don't go out and promote your blog, people aren't going to know it's there and the content won't really matter.
When I first started blogging, I was a shameless attention whore with promoting and within a couple of months I had the highest read journal on Journalspace. Self-promoting isn't all that hard if you just do a few things. Leave a lot of comments on other blogs. (Be sure and include your own blog address in the comment. Most sites have a place where you can type this in along with your name.)
It's a good thing to leave comments on the most popular blogs as it will get you more readers. Also, add your blog address to everything you write like e-mails, forum posts, mailing lists, etc. Make people aware that your writing is out there. When you get enough readers word will spread on its own if you have some interesting content, which, following my rules, you will.
15) Read my blog. Learn from a true master. I speak only in facts.
