Gee, I'll give you one guess which title will get this blog thousands of hits... And which blog will garner this blog only a few hundred hits for the day...
Duh!
Why write a blog? It's a good question. Writing a blog can be a thankless job. But, then again, you wouldn't write a blog if you wanted thanks because you'll get little, if any... (But thank you so much for the few people who have said, "Thanks!" You are super!)
No, you write a blog because you feel that you have a purpose or a mission. If you didn't feel that way, you'd quit after 3 months.
Why would you quit after 3 months? Because it would get very depressing very quickly when you realize that, after spending 3 or 4 hours a day agonizing over what you write - if you have the willpower to force yourself to write at all - that only 20 or 30 people bother to read what you wrote.
It's even worse if you open yourself up for criticism by having a "comments" section whereby illiterates can insult you and tell you to "f*ck off!" And, even at that, you only get one or two comments per day...
Oh, what we "writers" do for "art." (I can hear you snort, "Guffaw" right now!)
I've been writing this blog for 7 months now. It is a science and economic experiment. I am integrating Twitter and Facebook (as well as other Social Media) in promoting what I write on this blog. I have been trying different things to see what garners many hits (readers) and what goes "viral."
I also write this because I have been advising some companies on how to better market using the Internet, so, I guess if I am going to talk the talk, I'd better walk the walk.
You'd be amazed at how many people I meet who claim to be "experts" on Social Marketing, but they do not blog, they do not Facebook, nor do they use Mixi... How can they claim to be experts if they don't do this for themselves?
Social Media and Social Media Marketing are such new subjects that it's not like you can just go buy a book (there aren't that many good ones) and become an expert just by reading... Tell me, could you become an expert baseball player from reading books?
But I digress.... Back to what kind of content gets many readers? Of course, content is important, but I have also found that titles really do matter.
I've been experimenting with different blog titles; different Twitter teaser titles; different ways to entice people to come read the scribbles that I have written.
Unfortunately, it occurs to me that, if I write what I think are thought provoking articles about our world as it relates to Japan, my readership drops at a surprising rate.
But, if I write about something that doesn't affect any one's life at all, like how a Japanese woman with big boobs makes $3 million dollars a year doing porn, or a blog about how Japanese girl's are mountain climbing in miniskirts, I will receive a massive hit count that day the article is uploaded.
Of course, said article will require at least one cheesecake photo.
Gratuitous photo... Nothing to see here... Move along...
The one thing that really bothers me the most is how easy it is to sensationalize titles of blogs and promote them on Twitter. But, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I have worked in the mass media for decades and am never surprised by how easily people's minds are influenced by the media...
If the blog is about, say, how Japan's political environment is making a mess of the world's #3 economy... Then I will get a few hundred readers for that.... But, like I said, if I write, about porn, boobs, or sex, that blog will get thousands of hits....
Just something to consider about the Internet that I have discovered.
By the way, of course, I will insert words such as, "economy," "politics," "economics" and "boobs" in the keywords for search engines.... Give you one guess which word will be searched the most on the Internet....
But, then again, putting photos up of girls is a lot easier than writing a long dissertation.
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