(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Question: How Can I Get Pageview Numbers Like Yours?

Short Answer: Post free porn.  (Seri­ous­ly, your num­bers will explode–right up until your host shuts you down.)  

Long answer:

I’ve dealt with some peo­ple seri­ous­ly jeal­ous and kind of pissed off about my blog’s per­for­mance over the years. Some­times even friends who have had a hard time not let­ting that emo­tion con­sume them. Some who feel like I’m trick­ing them or being unfair when I tell them what I know.

This is what I tell them: 

Write five to sev­en entries a week.  Make most of them 2–3 pages. Over half the entries should be orig­i­nal con­tent of as high a qual­i­ty as you can pro­duce at that pace. (The oth­er half can be a com­bi­na­tion of try­ing to get peo­ple to vote on polls instead of just com­plain­ing about the results, link rec­om­men­da­tions, per­son­al updates, run­ning gags, and three­some ref­er­ences.) Cross-post every­thing. Annoy your friends. Slip the occa­sion­al real­ly awe­some arti­cle onto anoth­er social media (even though they dis­cour­age self-pro­mo­tion), but not so much that they notice. Ignore the friends who threat­en to “mute/unfriend” you if you don’t shut up. (Let them. Your oth­er friends will take pic­tures of their lunch­es.) Keep going even though you have days where 50 pageviews seems like a big deal. Avoid mobs of your friends with torch­es and pitch­forks.

Keep doing this.

Keep doing this.

Keep doing this.

After three or four years, get back to me.

I know that the idea of writ­ing dai­ly (or near­ly so) for years is intim­i­dat­ing. Aaaaaaaaaand you don’t have to do it. But you asked, and I’m telling you.

The main prob­lem I see isn’t that peo­ple work­ing hard can’t seem to improve their blog num­bers. The main prob­lem I see is that peo­ple who post infre­quent­ly and spo­rad­i­cal­ly are look­ing for some kind of short­cut. 

There isn’t one. 

I mean, besides porn.

First of all, my blog real­ly does­n’t do that well. My Face­book page is kind of jump­ing, but the blog it’s there to pro­mote is still pret­ty meh. If you live in Ukraine, you might think Eng­land is a steamy place for a sun­ny sum­mer vaca­tion, but if you live in Belize, Eng­land is an over­cast pop­si­cle. Nei­ther of those opin­ions is WRONG based on where some­one is from and their life expe­ri­ence. In this anal­o­gy there are an awful lot of Belizes. 

I self-pro­mote for hours a day (two at least). As of ear­ly 2021, on a good month I’ll do 50k hits. (It was a lot more for a cou­ple of years, but then Face­book did a mas­sive throt­tling of pages to try to get them to pay for adver­tis­ing.) Usu­al­ly hits per month are some­where between 30k and 40k.

So let’s keep those num­bers in per­spec­tive. I’m hard­ly the next Huff­Po or Whatever(Scalzi).

Hon­est­ly, I don’t have a secret or short­cut. I don’t want to chan­nel your dad or any­thing (“The only place where suc­cess comes before work is in the dic­tio­nary, you lit­tle whip­per­snap­per”), but there’s just no sub­sti­tute for work­ing hard to pro­duce good con­tent. That’s why blog­ging and e‑publishing and the new dimen­sions of the pub­lish­ing indus­try are great for writ­ers who fuck­ing WRITE, but are still not yield­ing fruit to peo­ple who don’t apply ass to chair, and why a tremen­dous num­ber of peo­ple who go through all the trou­ble of self-pub­lish­ing make a pit­tance. 

I know a lit­tle about SEO because I’m the kind of guy who does my home­work on the activ­i­ties I par­take in. (You should have seen me in research mode to find the clitoris.….although maybe anoth­er time.) I’m much more inter­est­ed in the writ­ing itself, so I am more con­cerned about how much ener­gy and time I’m putting into things that aren’t writ­ing — like SEO and self-pro­mo­tion. I’m much more inter­est­ed in find­ing the sweet spot where I’m doing the work I want and slow­ly grow­ing* than just get­ting “MOAR HITS!!!” no mat­ter what. I also know that any attempts to “trick” SEO (like with key­word-rich text) are met by increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed search engines chang­ing their algo­rithms to ignore such tricks. Google prides itself on its ongo­ing abil­i­ty to weed out bull­shit and keep good arti­cles at the top of a search.

*These innu­en­do puns real­ly write them­selves, don’t they?

This means the best advice I can give any­one (that will still be good advice in a year from now) is this: write good, high qual­i­ty, orig­i­nal con­tent as often as you can and on a pre­dictable sched­ule. If you do that, your num­bers will grow. Maybe not as fast as you would have hoped, but they will improve.

Check out the sec­tion in The Reli­quary called Blog­ging About Blog­ging if you want access to all the wis­dom and knowl­edge I’ve dropped. I’m not stingy with my insights.

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Want a future arti­cle to go into more detail? Mail me through our con­tact form. Just be sure to pick the right top­ic from the drop down menu, and check the archives—particularly the F.A.Q.—to see if your ques­tion has been asked before.

If you’re enjoy­ing this blog, and would like to see more arti­cles like this one, the writer is a guy with rent and insur­ance to pay who would love to spend more time writ­ing. Please con­sid­er con­tribut­ing to my Patre­on. As lit­tle as $3/month (less-than-a-lat­te a month) will get you in on backchan­nel con­ver­sa­tions, patron-only polls, and my spe­cial ear when I ask for advice about future projects or blog changes.

Or if a one-time dona­tion (or some type of non-mon­e­tary dona­tion) is more your speed, I have a Tip Jar with all the ways to help.