Forgive me readers for I have cheated. I have gone for numbers instead of quality and fame instead of loyalty. Maybe I should explain in a little more detail.
As I’ve been doing the rounds of blogs I like to read I’ve also noted those little boxy things that people have on the side bars or the end of the blogs. First there was the site meter. I liked that because for a while there you don’t know who’s reading, if anyone at all. As well as that you get this little map of the world which you can make bigger or smaller and you can whiz all over the world in a few seconds on your computer. If only my flight next week could be so easy.
Then I spotted Blog Explosion on someone’s site and I wondered what all that was about so I tagged it on because it promised to ‘EXPLODE YOUR BLOG TRAFFIC’.
Then I think I added the word count meter, which has stayed static the last few days and the least said about that the better. Thank god I never left any comments on Lofthouse’s blog because I have well and truly fallen off her wagon. I’m hoping that some Balinese beaches (as long as there no more Tsunamis) and some real down time will aid me to see where I am going wrong here.
About the same time I added the Cloud thing and Technorati. No, I must have added Technorati first. I liked that because I discovered that Frank Wilson (he who solves all those author puzzles on Shameless’s site REALLY quickly) had read my blog. You see site meter gives you numbers and locations but weird things happen, you can’t really work out who it is.
Yeah, so then came the cloud, because I liked the idea that a number of key words would let people know what I was about and I hate writing those blurb things at the top, so I thought this would be an alternative. I had to spend a good five minutes banning it from tagging all the expletives I use. The biggest tag to begin with was FUCKING and I figured that would just give the wrong impression; this site isn’t really about fucking.
And then I went back to Blog Explosion and wondered how it would explode my traffic.So far no one had visited my site from there. Well, it seems that first you have to surf and earn credits. It’s quite easy really you click on ‘surf blogs’ and then you look at them for 30 seconds and then you click onto the next one. In twenty minutes I had surfed ... I don’t know how many blogs and earned about 30 credits or so. Fantastic. I assigned my credits and then tootled back to my own blog and lo and behold my site meter had jumped by twenty! Shit it works, I thought (shit was another word I had to ban from my cloud).
Next day did the same thing, twenty minutes, but NO credits this time. Well I don’t know maybe I set it to auto assign. Went back to my site, another twenty or so visits. Fabulous.
Today I started doing the same thing and suddenly it dawned on me. Nobody is reading my site; they’re just trawling through blogs in search of credits. They’re spending the mandatory 30 seconds on my blog before clicking onto the next one and unlike me they may not even be reading the sites. So I quit Blog Explosion and have come back to the fold. There’s only one way to earn blog traffic. Write my posts, surf blogs, comment and hope that someone likes what I’m writing.
Oh and whoopsy. I forgot humble old BritBlog. They were the first actually and every now and again someone stumbles along from there or I find something on it. My last find was Chris Dolley who has (uh hum) some really cute (yes I am going to say this) kitten pictures and a hilarious account of his time as an extra on Luc Besson’s film Joan of Arc.
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