How to Get More People to Read Your Blog
The last couple months that I blogged at Forbes, I averaged around 500K uniques a month. At the time, that equaled about $5K a month in pay from Forbes to me. So, how did I achieve that?
Keep it simple
Image credit: Chanel Preston
The reason my traffic was that high was due in large part to one post: "What Porn Stars Do When the Porn Industry Shuts Down." (To date, the post has over 1M views, and it's the second most popular post I ever wrote in the three years that I wrote that blog. This is the most popular one.) Recently, the porn industry had shut down due to a male performer testing positive for HIV. The post started with a question: When adult performers can't work, what do they do with their time? The answer was more interesting than I expected.
Do the work
Too many shithead millennials today are too big of giant pussies to get on the phone or leave the house to do a fucking interview, much less work a real world beat. God, could you be anymore cowardly? Instead, the females and males of the species develop their mental dadbods by recycling original reporting that somebody else has done and everyone else has "aggregated" already. (If this is your job, you are a loser and a parasite.) For this piece, I got on the phone and interviewed people. It. Really. Wasn't. That. Hard.
Go for the obvious
The reason that damn nail salon piece was so popular was that the story was right in everyone's faces. Or at least the face of every journalist in New York City. With the porn story, every time the porn industry shuts down because a performer tests HIV+, the same dipshit outlets post the same stories about it. In this case, I thought the story behind the story was more interesting. These actors and actresses, crew members and directors, performers and editors weren't sitting around beating their meat or painting their nails during their industry's moratorium. They were out there hustling, supporting themselves and their families, worrying and praying. That's what made them human. And that's what made people who fuck for a living relatable to everybody.
Hey! Support your favorite writer, me, and buy my new short story, THE TUMOR. It's been described as "one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."