a howling crab

How to Have a Popular Blog, or, “147 and 1/2 Ways to Sacrifice a Virgin”

1. Have a blog title that is either official or totally weird.

Most people will deviate away from your blog page without a second glance regardless of whether you’re just talking about the weather, or if you’ve discovered the secrets of the universe and posted them for all to see.  To be popular, you obviously have to find a  way of bypassing this initial hurdle, and there are two easy (if not exactly shameless) ways of doing this: either name your blog something very official-sounding, or something just downright weird.

For example, most people might pass over “What I Was Thinking While I Brushed My Teeth This Morning”,  but what if you were to instead call your blog “The Morning Post”?  Sure, it sounds dry like toast and totally uninteresting, but it sounds official: like some kind of actually news-related person put thought into this blog.  Like there might be some kind of interesting, factual news stored in ready form somewhere in said blog.  Think of it as the online version of people who channel surf, but land on a news story and stay there for a minute just because it’s a news story: this is bound to get you at least the occasional haphazard speed-scroll down your page from viewers (until they realize you’re not a news organization, at which point, unfortunately, keeping that inveigled attention once you have it is up to you). This may sound silly, but a blog called “The Village Voice” actually shot to #1 in its state, after being renamed from “Musings of a Ho-Hum Housewife”.

If you don’t like coming off as dry like toast, however, you might opt to go with the former (and in my humble opinion, far more entertaining) strategy: naming your blog something outlandish or completely absurd.  This is a much more wide-reaching strategy, since your new fan-dangled title needn’t have anything at all to do with the actual content of your blog.  Let’s say, for instance, you choose to take your blog, currently titled “My Pet Bunny Rufus”, and change it to “147 and 1/2 Ways to Sacrifice a Virgin”. 

Does this have anything to do with your pet bunny Rufus? I certainly hope not. Does it grab attention? Oh yeah. Because even for those who might be initially turned off at the idea of a blog about sacrificing virgins (which I hope includes at least a good percentage of you), human curiosity will eventually win out, and readers are going to scroll down to see how you could come up with so many unique ways to do something that seems so straightforward; and if not, definitely to see how in the hell you came up with 1/2. Can you half sacrifice someone?  Do you only sacrifice the top half? Or the bottom? Hell, I’m getting curious just thinking about it.

2. Draw pictures.

The trend nowadays seems to be to draw pictures to add to the attractiveness of your blog.  And by pictures I mean extremely shitty stick figures slapdashedly colored in MS Paint with the fill bucket tool. I say this with absolute love in my heart for blogs like The Oatmeal, Hyperbole and a Half, and many others; after all, it doesn’t have to be Picasso to be hilarious.  But more importantly, this blog genre has tapped into a key flaw in the human psyche: impatience.

As society moves on, we have less and less time to do more and more pointless procrastination shit.  Back in Grandma’s Day, if you had a rock and a pond, you were ready for a good time. Now we spend countless hours balancing our study time carefully between facebook, myspace, tumblr, newgrounds, youtube, and so many others.  And really, with competition like that, what makes you think that someone has time to spend on your possibly-quite-sucky blog? In the case of plain text (like this one) most people tend to err on the side of caution and skip, rather than cut-in on their precious facebook time.  But if there are pictures… hey, PICTURES! This usually credits an automatic investigation by those who would simply passover a pure-text blog.  While it might take ages and yes, even ACTUAL READING to determine the entertainment value of a words-only blog, an entry stocked with pictures can be judged instantly, and without the need for actual brain function.

Furthermore, the mind is easily dazzled by silly squiggles and bright colors, and so even if your blog isn’t funny, or even if the text has nothing to do with the pictures at all, you’ve already satisfied the reader’s more superficial entertainment needs. Good job, you.  If you happen to also be very witty and relatable, you’ve got pure gold on your hands: a sure-fire way to become popular.

3. Make your blog a shitstorm of vampires.

While this is probably the most shameless strategy, it is extremely inclusive and easy to use successfully, since it taps into the vast pools of vampire tweenie boppers floating around on the net without requiring any actual talent or intelligence from you. Not to mention you could incorporate both strategies 1 and 2 into a vampire shitstorm blog; for instance, an illustrated fanfiction blog titled “147 and 1/2 Ways to Rape The Shit Out of Edward Cullen”.  This utilizes both previous strategies quite well, and also includes a broad audience.

Twilight haters (who will henceforth be referred to as “Normal People”) will give your blog an automatic cursory glance in the hopes that some of those ways include “with a jagged, rusty pole” or “by a rabid baboon troop”. 

Twihards, on the other hand, will swoop to your page in search of steamy (no matter how poorly crafted) sex scenes and more regurgitation of the shallow characters they so crave.  In fact, Twilight fanfic-ers have the upper hand when it comes to fanfiction in that, whereas other series have to worry about constantly being compared to the higher quality of the original work, the original Twilight book already scrapes the bottom of the literary barrel, so as long as you mention sparkles, Edward, and write some words in between, you’re set (let’s face it: no one has ever made the comment “this isn’t as good as the original” to a Twilight fanfic).

4. Fuck It.

Of course, in the end, I’m at the very bottom of the blog popularity scale, so this is all conjecture (by which I mean “trends I have recognized because I have eyes”). I don’t know about all of you, but I’m seriously considering re-titling my own tumblr “127 and 2/3 Ways To Breed Great Apes With A Bloodlust For Twilight Fans”.