The Blogosphere is Sort of Raping You

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My 20 visitors each day soon doubled but only after placing poems and fiction in internet literary magazines that would include a link to my blog. And only after making friends with a person that maintained a web address where over 400 people visited every day. I saw how Getting Linked was an effective means of driving traffic.

I often understood the scope of the number of my unique visitors by imagining them in a classroom: around 30 people was a classroom full of people, interested in me, every day. This way of perceiving the number of internet users that visited my website daily lent my metrics a significance that I cannot describe. I know that it encouraged me to vie for more attention.

After more time pushing my comments and poems and fiction on the internet I soon recognized some views that I had about certain things and I saw that creating controversy could drive traffic. I began to make controversial opinions public in a deliberately inflammatory way.

Visual I created in Photoshop when I ran a short story contest on my blog around a year and a half ago. I used both linking and controversy to drive traffic. Click it to see a readable size.

Soon my average number of unique visitors and pageviews had doubled and after some time tripled. My comments sections were filled with notes from regular commenters and people that I had emailed and even those that I had flown to visit and have romantic affairs with. I received unsolicited emails from people and organizations that asked me to write certain things or asked me a particular question because my input was desired.

During the course of my blog’s growth I had additionally published a book of poetry which was a collection of many of the poems that I had originally posted on my blog. As a result I had begun to receive low-level but somewhat widespread literary-media coverage and even a feature in NYLON Magazine. An extra-literary brand had thus been established with my name as its title. It was associated with other small-scale brands and people from outside the literary establishment and troll-base started coming to experience the brand more than the literature.

Pageviews by this time had perhaps quadrupled – but never for a sustained period of time – yet in moments of great controversy and linkage I sometimes reached over 1,000 unique visitors to my website. At this point I had maintained the web address for 2 years.