Playing the Blog hit game

On June 5^th 2012 my little blog set an all time hit record: 198 robots, spammers and readers incremented my counters. 198 hits would be embarrassing for a major blog like Instapundit but for Analyze the Data not the Drivel it was a “hitnotic” day. I always attribute my triumphs to my utter manly awesomeness but I had to ask; was anything else going on June 5^th, 2012?  Nothing much except the last transit of Venus in this century! The masses were searching for “transit” and hundreds landed on this little entry I wrote a few months ago.

It takes time for a blog post to burrow into cyberspace. Google and Bing are always prowling blog sites and will pick up new posts within minutes but it takes about two weeks before worldwide indexes are updated.  Once a post is on search engines readers will find it and when they do it will meet one of these three fates.

1. Nobody ever reads it again. This is the fate of most of my posts. I have posts that my dog, if I had a dog, wouldn’t read. It’s too bad because some of my finest lyrical unhinged rants are my least read posts.
2. It gets lots of hits followed by a quick return to few or none. My popular posts follow this pattern. Now that the 2012 transit of Venus is history people will stop searching for it. Popular posts fade faster than old Botox saturated actresses so enjoy your hits while they last!
3. It gets legs and keeps sucking in hits for weeks, months and years. My normal traffic comes from half a dozen leggy postings. My leggy-est posting is an Inception movie review that I wrote almost two years ago; it’s still generating ten to twenty hits per week. Its ok people nobody really got that movie.

Finally, the blog hit game is a long game; you have to keep playing. The best sports analogy is golf. Golf is the world’s hardest game. The gap between a perfect round of eighteen and what the best players are capable of is insurmountable. Nobody will ever shoot an honest eighteen. A best ball foursome of Buddha, Christ, Mohammad and the archangel Gabriel couldn’t shoot an honest eighteen. The Sun exploding tomorrow is more likely than on honest eighteen. Golf sets a bar so high it will never be breached. Artists have similar bars. The perfect novel is impossible. The perfect song is impossible. The perfect sculpture is impossible and I dare say the perfect blog post is impossible but then it’s the impossibility of perfection that keeps things interesting. Keep at it and the hits will come.