COMMENTARY – A blog by any other name still doesn’t get any traffic

Well, I’ve had this blog up for a few weeks now and am here to report that, despite any efforts, I still get about NO traffic. That’s right. I’m still largely talking to myself. So what else is new. Seems appropriate that if I largely talk to myself and no one listens to me in the real world, the same should go for my website. At any rate, I’ve made a little analysis of this phenomenon and put together a few tips on what to do and what not to do to get traffic to your blog. How to waste your time and not get any traffic You will not find “doing nothing” in this category, believe it or not. Think about it. If, by doing nothing, you get even a single visitor, you’re actually getting a better return on your time than if you spent hours working to promote your site only to get the same result. So from that perspective, doing nothing is actually quite efficient. However, if you are actually interested in getting any traffic, doing nothing is among the poorest forms of site promotion. There are even less efficient ways to not get traffic though. The following are a few examples. Blog directories. How many people actually sit down in front of their computer and think, “Hey, I want to read about other people’s mundane lives today, let’s see if I can find a directory of people’s stupid personal sites”? The answer, apparently, is nobody. I am listed in four or five different directories of this nature, and have only gained about 3 hits off of them collectively in the past two weeks. Most people that bored who find themselves sitting in front of a computer with an internet connection are far more likely to be looking for free porn. Webrings. An even dumber idea than blog directories. At least a blog directory is relatively quick and easy. You submit your site with some info, wait a few minutes to a few days, and your site gets listed. With a webring, you have to similarly submit your site, but then you have to wait for a ring administrator to visit your site and accept it, and then you need to add some code to your site to become an official member of the ring. And you have to do that for each and every ring you want to join. That’s a lot of work to not get any traffic. Now consider, for someone to actually find your site using a webring, they first have to stumble across the ring, and then they likely have to make their way through a mass of other dull, boring, and stupid sites in the ring in order to reach yours, assuming they don’t lose interest along the way first and go look for some free porn instead. With the five webrings I signed up for, I have only been approved for three, and between those I have only gained one meager hit in two weeks. How’s that for inefficient? Spam I have not engaged in this form of shameless self-promotion, but thought it was worth a mention. Nobody, save for maybe AOL subscribers, pays any attention to spam. Spam people’s email, and you’ll likely get filtered out, blocked, and/or deleted without a second glance. Spam message boards or chat rooms and you’ll meet similar success, with your posts most likely being deleted and you getting kicked/banned from the site or server as well. You might be able to meet short term success with spamming, by advertising your blog as free porn, but you will quickly lose those visitors once they discover the false advertising. How to actually get some traffic Let’s face it. Nobody really searches for blogs. Nobody cares about what you think or what you have to say, so they’re not even going to look for a site where you tell them as much, and if they are to stumble upon it, it was probably by accident and they will leave as quickly as possible before they might waste precious minutes read something, taking away from their time searching for free porn. So since getting legitimate traffic that is actually interested in your site is all but impossible, here are a few tricks to get some unknowing visitors to your site. Update constantly. You don’t even have to add any content. Just keep updating your site. This is particularly effective if you host your site on Blogger, as you are improving your chances of getting on that “10 Most Recently Updated” list on Blogger.com’s front page to make some cheap hits from people who are actually at least somewhat interested in blogs. The other advantage is that most search engines rank new sites better than those that are updated less frequently. This leads into my next point… Search engines. Again, let me reiterate that no one is ever actually going to look for your site, nor stumble across your site while searching for anything related to blogs in general. They’re too busy looking for free porn. Tailoring your site to rank well in searches related to terms on blogs or blogging will not do much to your benefit. Thankfully however, sites that are largely text based, as a blog should be, will generally rank well in search engines, since you have more keywords for them to hone in on. So use this to your advantage, and cover as many random words and phrases as possible in your posts. Then people searching for something totally irrelevant to the contents of your site will stumble across you in their search results thanks to the large volume of unrelated words on your blog. Free porn. Now, taking into consideration everything you just learned, you should no longer be attempting to promote your blog as a blog, but rather filling your site with as many random keywords as possible for commonly run search engine queries in order to get traffic. Probably the best way to do this is to say words like “free porn” as often as possible. Take a look at this post alone. I’ve used the words “free porn” more than half a dozen times already. I can guarantee you that I’ll get a good two dozen hits for this post off of search engines as a result. Of course, your visitors won’t stay long when they realize you don’t actually have any free porn, but hey, it beats trying to get legitimate traffic.