I have addictive tendencies. A couple years back when I was excited about the computer game Civilization III, I would get my son Willow to bed around 11 p.m., go into his room and play for just a little bit before I went to sleep. A little bit would often end when I looked out the window and saw the sun rising. My college lover Amanda waited until I graduated to give me my first Dungeons and Dragons module because she suspected that if had I gotten into fantasy role playing games earlier, I likely would not have graduated. I have assiduously avoided coffee, cigarettes and heroin because I could easily see these becoming powerful, disruptive, and expensive habits. More than a few people have suggested I am addicted to romantic relationships; my case against this charge is pretty weak.
sometime the sun comes up before the game is over
My latest addiction is traffic to my blog. I look at how many hits I have gotten on my blog three to five times a day, if I have an average post up. If I have a really good post up, I might look six to nine times. The other day I posted asking if
social networks can stop war and posted it on the Facebook site for Israel loves Iran and I got an impressive 891 hits, just one fewer than my best day of 892 hits on the
August 23rd earthquake, where people from across the country were looking for news about what was happening in Louisa.
This has inspired me to seek out currently hot internet memes (to use the common definition of this term – a repeated internet post – rather than the more robust definition I usually use), try to write something clever about them, and then put it on popular FB pages.
“Why are you trying to get your traffic up? What is the purpose of the blog?” asked
Bonnie during our recent visit to her Jamaica Plain, MA house. It is a great question, really. I mumbled something about it being good for a propagandist to see what their audience is interested in and that I also wanted to sharpen my writing. “So it is about your ego,” she perceptively concluded.
yeah, she is dangerous sexy, but i love her for her mind & local organizing projects.
After talking with Jeremy Bloom in Eugene, who is the editor and principal author of the
Red, Green, and Blue news blog, I was even more inspired to seek places to promote my blog. During the first few months of Occupy he was getting 200,000 hits a month. My current target is 1,000 hits per day, a bit over twice the volume I have on good days now. I am not sure what I’ll do when I reach that target, but it seems like a threshold for a respectable blog.
redgreenandblue.org – great blogs have great graphics
Still, my desire for respectability is not so strong that I am taking the most common “professional blogger” advice, which is to narrow my focus. Perhaps I will create a spin off a blog focusing on intentionally community stuff at some point, but I have a scatter shot life and I like that my blog reflects that.
The good news is it looks like I might have snagged a regular editor, more on her soon.
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your passport to complaining 
A regular editor would be good, because I think you don’t actually avoid heroine; your life is full of strong and amazing women! And Louisiana had a hurricane — Louisa had the quake.
lol Louisiana was actually my editors mistake and i did not catch it.
Your editor should catch “Louisiana” for “Louisa.” There was no earthquake in Louisiana. To drive traffic you might want to write about topics that interest lots of people, like porn, for instance–or NFL football–or Taylor Swift. How about, “Taylor Swift caught in porn scandal with two NFL football stars.” Write about that–the hits will follow.
i am not that type of whore. But thanks for your suggestion
Oh and of course you need links to buy things through Google ads and Amazon. I hear people make money through these, though I haven’t yet, but I bet you could! 😀
You should write about how to change the world – in little living ways.
i do some and i will more
Your efforts to drive more traffic to your blog are completely legitimate, and I respect them. However, you might want to consider their impact on the usefulness of the FEC site.
I’ve been reading your blog because I subscribe to the FEC feed. I’ve really benefited from a lot of the information you and others have shared about life in community. But the “hot internet memes” strategy you describe above, as it’s currently playing out, is making me seriously consider unsubscribing to that group feed. My RSS reader is cluttered with posts by you that are mostly not relevant to intentional community. You’re a good writer and an interesting character, and if I had tons of free time I might subscribe to your blog for its own sake… but I don’t, and most of the stuff you’re writing about lately has little to do with the FEC, which is really what I want to be reading about. So while you’re gaining readers, the FEC may well be losing them.