Were you ever wondering how to generate traffic for a lit blog attached to a seemingly never-coming literary magazine based on the reputations of two writers no one ever heard of? (That would be Tracy and I.) Well, most of our posts are not especially good answers to that question, but follow me in a journey up my own butt as I reveal our most traffic-getting posts of all time.
In this one I make fun of the concept of Lime-Cucumber Gatorade, then "liveblog" my first experience of the beverage. Hilarity ensues. This one is easily our all-time most popular post, and I wrote it drunk in about fifteen minutes on a Saturday night. A surprising number of people link to it on Facebook in a week, and it often gets dozens of hits a day from various Google searches, which makes sense given that we're the top result for a Google search on the subject, and I don't know about you but the first thing I do whenever I see or experience a new beverage is to Google it and see what some jerk with a blog thinks about it. This is also our most commented-upon post, with a current count of 13 comments, about twice what anything else has ever gotten, and still going strong. Most of the comments seem to like the drink, and several agree that I'm gay.
Nothing I write will ever be more popular than this post. Nothing. Ever. Soon it will develop its own consciousness and rampage through the countryside.
This one may grab the second-most hits from Google per day on average, but it's definitely first in disappointing Google users. I know this because people never find it searching for "Incisive commentary on sex in games that begins with the premise Duke Nukem Forever was a shitty game," or, "Video game discussion that ultimately and counter-intuitively concludes the Lunar series is the sexiest video game of all time," but instead some variation on "Duke Nukem sex tape" and "Duke Nukem sex." I'm pretty sure they just want to see the Duke get laid. Which is kind of weird, actually, because the sort of man-child who likes that game would presumably rather be dissolved in acid than be called gay. And yet here they are, searching for porn on the basis of its male participant. In any case, it makes me glad I elected not to include video of the offending Duke Nukem scenes.
This one is weird mainly in that people seem to be Googling its title pretty much exactly, but I don't feel like these are readers of the site. I guess they wake up one day and ask themselves, "Has anyone taught a Simpsons class? Did they learn anything from it? I sure hope so!"
The answer is Yes, the Internet. Someone has done that. (It was my wife.)
This one is benefitting not from particular Google searches so much as Google's faith that if something is linked in fifty places, it must be pretty good. Some guy who apparently answered one of those "Make money simply by blogging!" ads wrote a decent response (which I can't be bothered to find) to this post that was mostly actually a rehash of this post, then he put that response on every generic blog about books or reading within fifty miles, presumably in order to get someone (him or his corporate overlords) some AdSense dollars. My entire online writing career is about burying some pornographic Captain N fanfiction I wrote when I was fourteen at the very end of a long list of Google results, and this guy has really helped the cause.
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