aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, August 25, 2006
I don’t blog for traffic. Really.
Today my traffic was unusually high, double the average day. So I looked into it to find out why. Googlebombing. A throw away post I wrote so I could go to bed and still meet my self-imposed four-a-day minimum. It has a trackback from Googleblog so people are coming, looking and leaving and my traffic doubled. I’ve pretty much learned that’s how a small blog like mine gets blog traffic.
An inadvertent typo in April sent traffic through the roof with people expecting to find a religious conversion. I had a run-in with Wonkette that I’d rather forget (and won’t link to). And my best traffic ever was when a site known for outing famous people posted the simple (suggestive) phrase ”Oh… So gay!” linked to my post on the origins of the word ‘gay.’
The world beat a path to my blog to find out which DC politician I had outed. They left just as quickly, some feeling dismayed and deceived and most never having read the least little bit of my artful handiwork. 
So if you lust after traffic, you can get it. Just remember:
Most blog traffic is trash… Everyone knows it. If you look at your stats, you’ll learn that half of your traffic--or a lot more than half--comes from search engines. People type in things like “nipple schoolgirl goat priest molasses,” and they end up at your site for ten seconds, and they leave, hopefully disappointed. Those people aren’t “visitors,” no matter how much you like to think they are. They’re just lost.
The guy who wrote that has since let it lapse. Too bad. It was a good post:
Even worse, you may be getting traffic because big bloggers link to you. That doesn’t make you a success. It makes you a pet, living on table scraps. When the scraps stop coming--when you say the wrong thing and stop toadying--those tasty scraps can stop coming, instantly, and then you find out how much readers really care about you.
I’ve not toadied. But I have been linked to by the big blogs. The biggest of the big (and my hero, Cory) found me I don’t know how and linked. Not even a blip of traffic. Andrew Sullivan got me traffic and wrote a fine post, but he called me “Typical Joe” (horrors!) and I did come away from that one feeling vaguely like a begging hungry pet.
Internet fame is overrated anyway. Remember Gary Numa Numa Brolsma? His Internet fame began in his Jersey bedroom with a webcam in the fall of 2004. He had no idea what was in store for him. 13,367,200 views.
By Spring of 2005 he had been on Good Morning America and turned down an interview request by the NYTimes. It found his performance “earnest but painful” and called his posting it on the Internet a “grave mistake.” The paper of record also reported that “according to his relatives, he mopes around the house.”
Moldovan pop band O-Zone parlayed his performance into a Today Show appearance and a Universal contract, but the song, Dragostea Din Tei, looks destined to be a one hit wonder. If they’re lucky.
This week Rocketboom checked in with Gary. He’s making a new version of the video - “not the same but similar to the original” - and says YouTube is planning a contest. I’ll post about it on my blog.
Maybe if there’s a typo I’ll top a thousand visitors. That’s all the fame I need.
Really.
