The Hustler Diaries Part 8: How to Get 100,000 Unique Monthly Visitors

One of my goals for May was to reach 100,000 unique visitors a month on my Forbes blog. In fact, I surpassed that. My total unique monthly visitors for May was 114,867. Here’s how I got there.

Catch a ride on a beast

The Forbes website is a digital traffic juggernaut. According to Forbes, the entire site’s monthly visitors for April 2020 was 115 million. That is what is referred to in the digital traffic business as an absolute fuckton of traffic. I actually didn’t realize the traffic was that high. Last time I checked, however long ago, the site’s traffic was something like 80 million monthly visitors. In any case, think of your blog’s platform as you, a person, trying to get across the desert to a fresh water lake with water fountains and a water park. What’s the fastest way to get there? By foot? Or by catching a ride on a chimera that moves as fast as a cheetah, has the size of a woolly mammoth, and is as comfortable as a flight on Singapore Airlines? I am climbing on the chimera, thanks.

Grow your long tail traffic

I have a lot of long tail traffic on my Forbes blog. For me, that means stuff I wrote a long time ago still gets a lot of traffic. I’ve written some very popular posts over the years, ranging from the hardships of male porn stars to how to sell yourself. I still get emails about those posts. It’s all well and good if you want to vomit out seven posts a day on whatever is ranking high on Google, but most of that crap isn’t going to get you much long trail traffic. While trends may change, people generally remain the same. They want to be not bored, they want to find out how to better themselves, and they want to see shit they haven’t seen that makes them feel some kind of way they want to feel. Whatever Jake Paul did recently probably doesn’t fall into that category a few years from now. How to sell yourself does.

Write interesting stuff that’s on brand

Currently, my beat on my Forbes blog is the business of sex. I’ve been writing about sex and the porn industry for over 20 years, so I have a lot of ideas and a lot of connections. But this is Forbes, so it’s not like I’m going to be doling out blowjob advice. In my mind, my content on my Forbes blog is like a Venn diagram. If, very broadly put, Forbes is about business (it’s also about other things, like the economy, work, women, entrepreneurship, and money), that’s one circle. If, very broadly put, my brand is about sex, that’s another circle. The content that appears on my Forbes blog is the intersection of those two, the place where business and sex overlap. That’s my brand. So when I wrote about Lena the Plug, who is an X-rated social media influencer making seven figures a year, that’s about her business. Or when I wrote about how the coronavirus is impacting strippers, that’s about how the pandemic is impacting their bottom line. In this way, I straddle two worlds: The world of sex, in which things are always interesting and engaging, and the world of business, which tends to be covered by boring people in boring ways. Imagine making something boring sexy! It works for me.

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The Reverse Cowgirl Rides Again

This is a line from "Julie & Julia," starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. Adams plays a blogger named Julie Powell who sets out to cook all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Streep plays Julia Child (the book's author). Both characters were real. In this scene, Julie learns from her husband that her blog on Salon.com in which she chronicles her cooking is the third most popular blog on the site. While it's not in the movie, Julie's blog was in third place because it was less popular than my Salon blog, The Reverse Cowgirl. ✨

56 Likes, 5 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "This is a line from "Julie & Julia," starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. Adams plays a blogger..."

Over on Instagram, I reminisced about how I ended up being not-referenced-referenced in the movie “Julie & Julia.” At the time, I had a very popular blog on Salon. It was called The Reverse Cowgirl. Subsequently, a less popular blog, which was about cooking, was turned into a movie.

Like this blog? Support my work by buying a copy of my digital short story: "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."

Eating Naked

On my Forbes blog, I wrote about the impeding shuttering of a restaurant in Paris for nudists—or, you know, people who want to eat in the buff. Here’s a bit from the post:

“Arguably, the most intriguing opportunity of nude eating in a restaurant is more symbolic than shrewd. Imagine a first date where everything was out on the table. Nothing in between you and your date but the table and the food. With little to hide, one might be more inclined to share more, to keep fewer secrets, to let down their guard and show the world who they really are.”

Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."

Newsletters Are the New Blogging

I’m pretty sure I read this somewhere else already, but it seems like newsletters have kept some of the intimacy that blogging lost when it died or at least became strangled. I don’t subscribe to a lot of newsletters, finding most of them to be clutter, but here are three I like: Maud Newton’s, Sean Bonner’s, and California Sun. When I read each one of them, I feel that sweet sense of connection that I used to feel reading blogs when blogs were a thing. Maud doesn’t send hers a lot, but they’re worth it. In her last one, she wrote about going to Yaddo and concluded: “Whatever you create or most like to do, in 2019 I wish you stillness to do it in the way that’s most satisfying to you.” Who’s wished stillness for you lately? Sean’s is always an eclectic, punkish mix, starting off with a bunch of weird images, and in a recent one he talked about a health thing, and life in Japan v. life in LA, and “‘being a woman in blockchain.’” California Sun is a bit different—one could say commercial—and it’s, you know, about California, so maybe there’s no point in reading it if you’re from some state that just wants to be California—because, let’s face it, what state doesn’t—or maybe there is. Anyway, being a Californian (born and bred, not imported), it is maybe a thing of love or a daily dose of obsession. To read it is to remember what it is to like someone or something that’s better than yourself.

Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."

You're Not Reading This

After some time off, I have been blogging more lately. One thing that’s different is that I’m not posting links to these posts on social media; at least, not at the moment. In the deluge of the attention economy, is no attention the new high-value asset? I’ve spent most of my career pulling revenue from two threads: more creative work and more commercial work. I was able to be successful doing commercial work because I understood how to monetize attention and how to grow it. I did that sort of work for companies ranging from Time Warner to Procter & Gamble. The age-old question is: Does commercial work kill creative work? I never found that to be the case. I felt they were Siamese twins: inextricably linked. Whatever I was doing commercially tended to inform whatever I was doing creatively and vice versa; the relationship was symbiotic. What happens if you stop paying attention to how many people are paying attention? Obviously, this site has traffic stats, but I haven’t looked at them. If you write like no one is reading, if you speak like no one is listening, if you act like no one is watching, what happens next?

Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."

Recent Things

Keeping up with me on my Forbes blog? I've posted a few things there lately that are worth a look. 

I'm super excited for the premiere of HBO's porn drama "The Deuce" this fall.

This guy likes to smear food on his face and take pictures.

Say hell yes to ladies-only "Wonder Women" screenings!

Dubai's Robocop scares me.

And don't miss my think-piece on mugshots and why love them. (Hint: It's not them, it's you.)

"Inspected at this range, the supermodel is revealed to have a slight mustache. The famous actress has an angry pimple. The male superstar has something awful stuck between his teeth. Stars, we think, feeling pleased, they're just like us."

The Latest, The Greatest

If you haven't already, check out some of my recent posts over on my Forbes blog.

I wrote about a subscription box service for ... strippers. I interviewed a woman who got cancer -- and then got an obscene grill. And I shared my thoughts on Netflix's "I Love Dick." 

Related to that last, I enjoyed Alexandra Schwartz's more negative and cleverly cutting evisceration of "I Love Dick" in the New Yorker. 

She writes:

"That manifesto-like tone is typical of the show. In moments like this, it lands with cocky charm. Mostly, though, it seems as if Soloway and the women of her writer’s room (to her credit, she insisted on an all-female script team) sat around spit-balling sound bites to print on T-shirts or Women’s March posters."

Ouch.

What Is Blogging?

Jason Kottke has an interesting post here in which he compares blogging to vaudeville. 

He writes:

Image via 3:AM Magazine

"Not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this on here before, but I often think of blogging as vaudeville to social media’s moving pictures (aka 'movies')." 

His post was inspired by another post by Tim Bray about blogging.

He writes:

"The great dan­ger is that the Web’s fu­ture is mall-like: No space re­al­ly pub­lic, no store­fronts but na­tion­al brands’, no vi­su­als com­posed by am­a­teurs, noth­ing that’s on of­fer just for its own sake, and for love."

I like both of these considerations a lot. Writing this post, a line from one of the world's greatest photojournalists, James Nachtwey, came to mind:

"I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony."

Here's what Merriam-Webster says about what it means to bear witness:

"to show that something exists or is true"

That's my experience of blogging. That it's the act of bearing witness to one's life, that writing it down in public is a way of showing that one exists and one's life is true, that to blog is to insist that one is real and that one's existence is deserving of being witnessed by the world.

Forbes Blog Monthly Stats #5

Every month, I review the traffic stats at my Forbes blog. This is my latest.

Last month was terrific. This month was not so much. Last month, I did around 193K unique visitors and 230K page views. This month I did around 115K unique visitors and 140K page views.

Here's what worked and what could use improvement.

The month's post popular post had to do with soft-core lesbian porn. The reasons for its popularity elude me. Another frequently read post was about an MMA fighter on trial for beating up his former porn star ex-girlfriend. The surprise post of the month was about Wonder Woman's armpit hair. Frankly, I wrote that one without thinking much about it, and it caused quite a fuss, getting cited by the National Review and discussed for a full hour on "The Dennis Prager Show." Apparently, armpit hair on female superheroes is a must-click topic. I'll keep that in mind for April. I also wrote a post about some porny YSL ads that upset some Parisians. That post got a nod from the Kansas City Star. The post I thought was the most unique was an interview I did with a lifestyle blogger -- who's armed and dangerous. 

As for what I can work on: post more, be more creative, write better headlines, do more interviews, be more daring, focus more on things that are fun, keep up the regular posting.

I'm noticing that I'm writing more about women-related issues, and I'd like to do more of it. In addition, I'm doing more hot takes, which is good, because that makes you a part of the conversation. And it was nice to get some media attention.

Yo, it's all good in the bloghood.

Final monthly stats: 

Pageviews: 140,725

Total Monthly Visitors: 115,545

One-time Visitors: 112,156

Repeat Visitors: 3,389

Comments: 46

Posts: 12

Current Recency Score: 74.511%

Forbes Blog Monthly Stats #4

This is the fourth post in a series in which I explore my Forbes blog traffic. Since I've made a living for years by prompting people to click, I'm using this to document some of the ways in which this works. The answer, by the way, will always be as elusive as the human soul.

Regardless, simply put, I fucking killed it in February. Which was nice, because last month, I really shit the bed.

In January, I had 51,135 views.

In February, I had 193,011 views. 

What went right? (I wrote another post about all this stuff on my Forbes blog yesterday, as well.) Basically, I'd been working the business of vice beat for years, and I never really felt like I could get a handle on it, so this last month, I was like, fuck it, I'm going to do it, and by doing it, I'll figure it out. So my commitment to myself was that I had to post once a day every weekday. Which I did. Thankfully, a short month. It's kind of like running, I suppose. You don't figure out how to run longer by thinking about it. You figure out how to run longer by running. Seems obvious, but do you practice it? Sometimes, thinking about shit is an excuse.

The most popular post was "Playboy Is Naked Again and It Is Awesome" with 85,978 views. Second most popular was "What Diversity? Kate Upton Covers Sports Illustrated Issue" with 33,912 views. Third most popular was "This $85,000 Gun Has a Piece of the Statue of Liberty in It" with 12,875 views. Fourth most popular was "A Male Porn Star Discovers Leaving Porn Is Harder Than You'd Think" with 9,535 views. And fifth most popular was "This Female Photographer Shoots in Strip Clubs" with 7,905 views. Sensing a trend? Never let them tell you sex doesn't sell. I'd like this lineup of top posts to be more diverse -- although, let's not frown at sex and violence. I'd like to see more posts about guns, booze, smoking, gambling, and rampant drug use. And over-the-top cars. And prisons. Let's shoot for that in March.

What went wrong? Here are a few posts that really shit the bed: "This Fashion Brand Wants You to Make Love, Not Walls" with 81 views, "Why Is This Model Wearing a Garbage Can Lid on Her Head?" with 158 views, and "How to Quadruple Your Blog Traffic in 30 Days" (meta!) with 133 views. I'm not sure what exactly went wrong here, but I would say that in general my headlines need work. They're too flat. Why is this? I need to deliver more hot takes and write more about things that I have some sort of passionate response to when I find them. All of these titles are boring. Boring is the enemy. Kill boredom. Toss it in a wood chipper. Die, boredom, die.

The front page of a site that gets 50M+ uniques a months is where you want to be.

Come back in April to find out how I did in March. I call it blogging for dollars, and that's how we roll in 2017. 

Final monthly stats:

Pageviews: 230,163

Total Monthly Visitors: 193,011

One-time Visitors: 186,854

Repeat Visitors: 6,157

Comments: 42

Posts: 20

Current Recency Score: 83.928%

Oh, and my repeat visitors are an embarrassment. My bounce rate is to the moon. Must. Fix. That. 

Read It and Don't Weep

Over on my Forbes blog, I wrote a kind of impassioned post about blogging for dollars, and also about women, and of course about writing. 

Read it, won't you?

"Then I realized something that's taken decades of therapy to penetrate my thick skull. You can't think your way into things. You have to do your way into things. So at the start of February 2017, I decided: I still don't 'get' how to do this beat, but I'm just going to do it, and I'm willing to bet that by simply doing it, even though I think I don't know how to do it, I will figure out how to do it."

Don't Let the Boys Win

If you're a girl, and you blog for a living, don't just aggregate. Originate. Sometimes it seems like the boys have more balls. They brag about their FOIAs, and they win their Pulitzers. You should be digging up the new stuff, too, not just regurgitating that shit that's already out there.

That's Lois Lane

Send an email

It takes you 10 minutes to write an email with 10 questions in it. Find someone who interests you, write 10 interview questions, and then push SEND. You just might learning something new that you can add to your story. 

Get on the phone

The other day, I made a call to request permission to use some photos. I ended up doing an interview with the head of the company. Phoners really aren't that hard. Do one a day. A down-and-dirty call can take as little as 15 minutes.

Leave the house

Get out of your apartment/office/house at least once a day. Look around in the world for something you'd like to cover. One time I did this, and I found a guy who was looking for a job from his living room window. 

Forbes Blog Monthly Stats #3

Last year, I started and then stopped a transparent blogging traffic series in which I examined the numbers associated with my Forbes blog, SIN INC, where I cover the business of vice (guns, sex, alcohol, gambling, etc.). That series -- you can read #1 here and #2 here -- went on hiatus for some reason. Now it's back. It may or may not shed light on "blogging for dollars" for you, if that's something you do.

I'm going to focus here in on January 2017, which I hope is the last month that my traffic on the blog there will suck. I had put a pause on blogging on the Forbes website for a few months prior, in order to work on another project, but this month, February 2017, is really banging so far, traffic-wise, and I look forward to detailing that next month.

Let's talk about January. So January 2017 will be, I hope, the last time I post the minimum number of times required, which is five, at least for me. Historically, I've not infrequently procrastinated until the end of the month, and then posted during the last five days of the month. What a bum. Thankfully, in February 2017, I started posting five times a week, every weekday, and that's been working great. I'll detail how that happened in next month's post.

In any case, I did a post on a firearms coloring book that I thought was interesting. I enjoyed interviewing the woman who created it. That post got 2,833 views, which is not that great, but whatever. I also wrote a post about a new Playboy Club that's coming to New York. That got 1,806 views, which is way meh. Since I sometimes work as a copywriter, I like to write about ads, and I wrote about the Mr. Clean sexes up the Super Bowl phenomenon. That got 6,018 views, which is better than the others. A post about an autographed copy of Playboy signed by Not My President really shit the bed with 724 views. I also watched the new Warren Buffett documentary and extracted five tips for women. That got 6,000 views. So, in all, not a great month, but lots of room for improvement.

Thoughts: My headlines aren't strong enough. Thankfully, the Forbes CMS has a funny little widget that reviews your headline, grades it, and helps you make it better. I didn't post more, but I'm working on that this month. And I offered little in the way of "hot takes." The closest thing was the Buffett post, because part of my point to women was good luck turning into Buffett if you weren't born a white male, because that's what Buffett points to in the documentary as the equivalent of winning the "ovarian lottery." But the post should've been stronger in tone and funnier.

Final monthly stats:

Pageviews: 66,116

Total Monthly Visitors: 51,135

One-time Visitors: 49,431

Repeat Visitors: 1,704

Comments: 0

Posts: 5

Current Recency Score: 35.967

In any case, come back next month for a far-more impressive tally. I'm also going to talk about finding better story ideas on what I've come to refer to as "the grey web." It's where everyone else isn't hunting for fodder.

On the BBC

I did a short interview tonight with BBC Radio 5 Live. I believe it will be archived here.

We discussed my recent post on my Forbes.com blog: "Playboy Is Naked Again and It Is Awesome."

Years ago, I visited a Playboy shoot. As I watched, a naked young woman lolled about on the bed, smooshing her boobs together with her arms and pointing her toes like a retro pinup from a bygone era. Today, Hef is 90, and the new Playboy is decidedly contemporary. The cover features March Playmate Elizabeth Elam looking natural, the cover headline reads "Naked Is Normal," and the Playboy Interview isn't with a modern-day Norman Mailer but Scarlett Johansson, the top-grossing actor of 2016, who pulled in $1.2 billion in global ticket sales. The other nude layouts throughout the magazine are somewhere between classy and, well, sweet. Gone is the greased up and surgically enhanced Playmate of yesteryear. This is the 21st century feminist next door.

You cant write for shit.

I have made more on my writing in a week than you will in a lifetime.  (You are a shitty writer).

Buy THE TUMOR, a digital short by Susannah Breslin that's been called "A masterpiece of short fiction."

Forbes Blog Monthly Stats #2

You can read Forbes Blog Monthly Stats #1 here.

The month of June was a real fail whale of a month for my Forbes blog. In May, my total monthly visitors was 98,340. In June, it was 62,925. Shakira's hips don't lie, and neither do those numbers. What went wrong? Let's discuss.

In my last post, I wrote: "In June, I'm aiming to post five times a week, as a way of building my traffic." Instead of doing so, I posted a grand total of seven times out of a possible twenty-two times. Simply put, when the initial posts I wrote didn't "pop," traffic-wise, I got frustrated and wandered off in another direction. Another reason this didn't "work" is that "quality over quantity" is probably the better mantra here, not "quantity over quality." Most of the posts I wrote got crap traffic. The one that got the most traffic was one about Trophy Wife Barbie, which was fun to do. 

Of course, one can always look for things to blame. Blogging is slower in the summer! My mojo was off! I was too busy working on my book proposal! And yet when one blogs, one has no one to blame but oneself, and so I shall bear the burden of my blogging failure.

Image via Ironing Board Collective

A couple days ago, I put together a short list of five posts that I thought could do well traffic-wise. More "interesting ideas" than "churn and burn." The first of those posts will run next week. I think it will be a good one.

Let's hope for a better performance in July.

Final monthly stats:

Pageviews: 80,648

Total Monthly Visitors: 62,925

One-time Visitors: 60,673

Repeat Visitors: 2,252

Comments: 18

Posts: 7

Current Recency Score: for some reason my recency score isn't appearing on my dashboard

So come back next month and see if I can get quality over quantity to get this thing going again.

Forbes Blog Monthly Stats #1

In the spirit of improving my performance on my Forbes blog, I'll be posting my monthly traffic stats here.

I'm required to post a minimum of five times a month, which I did in May. In June, I'm aiming to post five times a week, as a way of building my traffic.

In May, two posts have proved to be traffic duds thus far: "This Champagne Gun Will Make You Feel Rich" with 411 views and "Is This the Most Expensive Gun in the World?" with 208 views. The latter was only published yesterday. At the very least, both suffer from weak headlines.

The top performing post of the month was "Absolut Vodka Gets Provocative with Transgender Ad" with 28,115 views. This post was also the most interesting post of the month, because the comments on it generated debate. Some people loved the ad: "Bravo Absolut! This was great!" Some people hated the ad: "I find it offensive." And one reader said my choice of title was "disingenuous and rabble rousing," adding, "Kudos for guising your transphobia." While I disagree with the "transphobia" accusation, I was open to changing the headline to, per their suggestion, "Absolut Vodka Releases Transgender-Positive Ad." I emailed an editor about making that change, but haven't heard back yet. The commenter was pleased with that idea, but noted that I was engaged in "linguistic terrorism." So I guess I'm a terrorist.

My favorite post of the month was "This Dancer Is Turning Strip Club Conversations into Art" with 17,883 views. I interviewed this post's stripper subject through email, and I included several examples of her terrific art. I was careful with this post to not make it so racy that someone at Forbes would get annoyed, and I thought I did a good job of that.

Of course, blogging on Forbes provides its own set of challenges, the most egregious being that it pushes readers to dismantle their ad blocker. Obviously, from a market standpoint, I understand that the company needs to make money and readers must pay in some way. At the same time, Forbes page loading times are simply horrendous and make it more difficult for contributors to the site whose readers most tolerate impossibly slow load times ... or leave. I don't understand why the page must be encumbered with more ads than an overloaded burro descending into the Grand Canyon, but I suppose there isn't much I can do in that regard. Other challenges particular and not particular to me regarding posting at Forbes include the fact that there are so many damn contributors -- it would've been nice to have capped that number before it went over, say, 1,000, or, you know, long before that, in order to maintain quality levels -- and I surmise the current channel I'm in, Lifestyle, is not one of its strongest in terms of traffic (I'm not entirely sure about that). Regardless, there are contributors on the site who get an absolute shit ton of traffic -- mostly writing about technology, games, and movies, it seems -- and I've been remiss in being on the ball as a contributor as of late. That's part of why I'm writing this post -- to locate the strengths and weaknesses of this process.

Final monthly stats:

Pageviews: 121,787

Total Monthly Visitors: 98,340

One-time Visitors: 94,837

Repeat Visitors: 3,503

Comments: 26

Posts: 5

Current Recency Score: 64

The Recency score is something newer to the Forbes contributor pay model. Instead of allowing contributors to coast on highly-trafficked evergreen posts from the past -- for me, it was "The Hardest Thing About Being a Male Porn Star" with 1,923,289 views -- more recent posts are given a score that gives greater pay weight to newer posts. In other words, more recent posts make you more money.

In the past my traffic has been as high as 500,000 views a month, so that is my goal for June: 500,000 views. I'll report back on that in a month, if all goes as planned.

#Nipplegate

A recent post I wrote on my Forbes blog about whether or not you should post sexy photos to LinkedIn generated some debate in the comments. The picture you see here is the picture that was up for discussion. The owner of a bathing suit company posted it to her LinkedIn page. So, you see, it is on brand. And yet, LinkedIn is so devoid of sexuality that the context makes the picture more provocative. (See: nipples.) In any case, interesting. Eye of the beholder, I suppose.

Return of the Reverse Cowgirl

🙌🏻

"🙌🏻"

Or something like it. After several aborted attempts to refocus this blog, I'm trying here again. This time around, I'm taking another pass at sex blogging. We'll see how that goes. Thanks for your patience.

How to Blog Every Day

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

I almost forgot to blog today. In fact, I was in bed when I realized I had not yet blogged. So I got out of bed to blog.

Some days, I write a "B" in ink on my left hand to remind myself not to forget to blog.

I'm blogging 366 days this year. It's only day 20, and I have 346 more to go. (It's a leap year.)

It appears that I've been following Rule #12 of Manifesto of a Doer, which I discovered on This Isn't Happiness today.

To wit:

"Sprint. Rest. Sprint. Rest. Human's get more done in bursts followed by rest. Getting things done isn't about who does the longest hours, but who does the smartest hours."

Lately, I've been very, very smart.

You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.