It’s a fascinating pursuit to examine what brings people to a blog. Thanks to my Site Meter – and you can click on the icon in the left sidebar – I can track the search words and links which lead readers across the country and around the world to DemWit.
The results might surprise you!
I have a friend who is a blogging fool, publishing multiple political posts per day. This friend has daughers and told me the single post which has brought the most visitors to the blog was one protesting young teenage girls getting “bikini waxes.” So, thousands came to this important political blog by putting “bikini wax” into various search engines!
I can identify. For two years I wrote my heart out on my archived blog, “I See My Dreams,” and the post which has lured the most visitors – oh, about a thousand so far – was titled “boobtube.com” – a silly bit about media coverage of Hillary Clinton “showing cleavage” on the Senate floor. They are still coming – every day via the search-engine term, “boobtube.com”. Let me just put it this way: these searchers aren’t interested in Hillary’s cleavage! Turns out that’s also a Web site, and you don’t want the kids or grandkids looking over your shoulder if you check it out!
On 19 June 2007, I posted “A ‘do-nothing’ Congress?” over at Dreams, and hundreds of readers came via links to the post which appeared on CNN.com and on the successful liberal blog, Daily Kos. That was cool.
Interestingly, I’ve had a lot of foreign visitors coming in search of “Tagore’s prayer,” which I’ve traditionally run on various blogs on the eve of elections.
So, now let’s look at what draws people to DemWit:
THIRD PLACE:
“Obama Potentate flag?” – I wrote about a blogger ragging over the Ohio State flag being an Obama flag. The writer later claimed his post was “satire,” but his intent was hard to detect. This DemWit post continues to bring visitors every day!
SECOND PLACE:
This one makes me happy. Since I posted “Detecting propaganda” on 23 October 2008, I’ve had about 500 visitors via that search term or the names of the various propaganda devices. Also bringing readers are links on “Ideas Festival” and on an education site in Maine. I suspect a professor sent students to read this important essay as some 100 visitors from the University of Oklahoma showed up over a two-day period. Each day more and more come to this post, and it’s a thrill to be imparting such knowledge.
Drumroll!
FIRST PLACE:
And, the number one search term which has brought the most visitors to DemWit has nothing to do with one of my posts, but involves a simple aside I left as a comment on “From Hillary’s viewpoint.” The search term? “Laura Ingraham’s leopard-skin mini-skirt.” Here’s the comment – the profound words I wrote – which has drawn the most visitors – about 1,000 - to my blog to date:
“Frodo mentioned Laura Ingaham’s comment on Hillary’s attire, and I cannot resist sharing this: David Brock, creator of mediamatters.org, in his book “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative” paints a very colorful scene with Laura Ingraham, clad in a leopard-skin mini-skirt crawling across the floor at a D.C. cocktail party – dog drunk. David and Laura were young right-wing movers and shakers hired as hatchetmen to spread dirt on the Clintons. All the vivid details are in the book.
“By the way, the only thing on TV worse than Bill O’Reilly is Laura Ingraham substituting for Bill O’Reilly!”
There hasn't been this much attention to attire since Nastassia Kinski posed with the snake!
WHAT I REGRET
The posts I consider my best – the ones I’ve worked the hardest on, researching like crazy and peppering with source links – are rarely read. People break out in a rash over any post longer than two paragraphs – paraphrasing Tom Brokaw.
Frequent cable news guest Craig Crawford, blogging at CQ Politics, has the right idea. Instead of publishing a 20-paragraph post, he pubishes about 20 one-paragraph posts a day – and his is a well-traveled blog!
WHY I BLOG:
All those people learning how to detect propaganda!
And, of course, you.
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6 comments:
You have my full sympathy! Just for the hell of it I'm going to do a post with just one word in it "TURD". That out to have my sitemeter traveling at the speed of light... ROFL!
Frodo nearly started a war. Writing about a planned special on BBC in which all of the women in a small British community left town for a week, Frodo smirked while the men of the town bumbled and fumbled. The Lord Town Mayor, a man, came aggressively to defend his brethren. The mental picture of pitchforks and broomsticks haunts Frodo to this day. Not even his assaults on anything Texan have matched the aggressive response he received from those hapless English wimps.
I have no anecdotes about blogging.
Oh, but Airth, you would if you had a Site Meter! Some of the search terms are not fit to print. I used to have people coming to “I See My Dreams,” looking for interpretations to their dreams, and some of those were pretty WILD! Fun stuff, though! BJ
Fun stuff, BJ. On the news sites, check out the "most-read" stories. The ones at the top are mostly tripe.
I think I get most of my traffic when I use place names, especially if they're in other countries. I seem to get browsers looking to see if somebody wrote about their small town or village. I got some angry emails when I wrote about Mugabe too. Since I don't write about boobies, I guess that's the best anecdote I can offer. Thanks BJ - Michael
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