Algorithms, and How to Get One Million Hits On Your Blog. Louis Shalako.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stuff them keywords...

Louis Shalako

A recent story (BBC I think), noted that Google had diddled the algorithms and killed a lot of traffic to established websites. My latest story has a grand total of 25 reads or hits.

Over fourteen years, the site has garnered 961 k hits. My first blog post wasn't very good.

It took a week to get a handful of hits, some of which might have been indexing bots or even my own reads, which can be managed through the site. But this is why I think people quit blogging. They have a dozen or so stories up, and they don't keep it up because it looks like it isn't working. Looking at the big spikes in the graph: someone adjusted their algorithms and I got 60,000 hits from France in a few months. (Page bottom). The next big spike, came out of nowhere, and traffic was unusually high at a time when I really wasn't doing much with the blog, although I routinely repost old stories. I routinely repost online serial content, including Heaven Is Too Far Away.

I'm the only guy I know who does online serial fiction. I was probably the first, and possibly the last, to serialize a manuscript before the book was even finished...

Once you have the content, (and my blog is close to 1,200 posts), you can recycle it in various ways. You can also update the links, fix a typo, add photos, etc. I hope to have one million hits sooner rather than later—I had hoped by summer, but things have definitely slowed down, for whatever reason.

When I get a million hits, I'm going to call up the newspaper—

I have scraped my own blog for a new ebook or short story. An example would be One Million Words of Crap, available for free as an audiobook from Google Play. 

Lately, I am replacing Smashwords links with sites that are still up and running as ebook aggregators, yes; I have paperbacks and audiobooks as well. I found out about Smashwords on Facebook. As I said, when I repost a story, I can update as well. I can take out dead links and add in a new one.

Smashwords and Draft2Digital have merged and the books will surface over there in a month or two.

Scary shit for beginners.

When you go to edit an old story on Blogger, the interface might show the code. People take one look at that and it’s “…fuck. I can’t do that—”

Well, just so you know, for the first six months, I didn’t even know what a tag was. The site can be a bit glitchy at times, but just keep hacking away and you will get it. When formatting, it's hack, hack, hack, then preview. Save, then hack some more...confidence is everything, and patience is everything else.

On the upper left, click on ‘compose mode’ and its back to the old familiar interface. Just a quick pro tip, I compose in a Word doc and that way I can control the font size. There are just a lot more tools in the doc format. I prefer 13-pt Times New Roman. I copy and paste from the doc file.

It was at Genrecon, held at the Sarnia Library in 2009 where I met Douglas Smith. I cornered him for a minute and introduced myself and all of that. He is the one who suggested a couple of things. One was to join Facebook. The other was to try a free blog from Blogger. And we all know how that went.

When I signed up for Facebook, one of the first things I said was: “Whoever invented this is a genius.”

And I was right, too.

The blog is fairly flexible. You can change themes, change colours and fonts. Click around on all the buttons in order to figure out what to do. The widgets are handy, as you can see from the right-hand column. I had to fight for quite some time to get Google to take ads off of the blog. They were telling me that I had some kind of problem with the blog, and they weren’t paying me for blog hits. I said, if you’re not paying for blog hits, please take the ads off of my blog. I will never see a penny of it anyways. In fourteen years of blogging, they owe me $25.88 and the threshold for payment is $100.00. If you’re in this for the money, you might want to prepare for a little disappointment…and a few spammers in the comment section.

'Compose mode' is a lot more civilized.

Their help pages are impenetrable. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they wanted me to do, and I did provide feedback, more than once, to exactly no response whatsoever.

You can stuff keywords into your posts, but a handful of tags will do nicely.

You might read Active Versus Passive Blogging.

The best thing you can do is to produce regular, interesting, helpful and informative content. Entertain the people. Sing for your supper. As for myself, I do enjoy the work, and that is always something.

Right. And if I die, and if Google gets to keep my $25.88, then I guess that’s what the service was worth. In other words, not much, but the actual blog is what you make of it. My most popular story is Ghost Planet, with over twelve thousand reads...over ten or twelve years. I won't stick in a link for that one. If you would like to take a look at it...you will have to Google it.

(Tricky, Louis. - ed.)

(Yes, but it might also work.)

And, in the meantime, it is a useful promotional tool.

#Louis

END

Click on the image to enlarge.

From the BBC: Google's New Algorithm.

The website of Douglas Smith.

Louis has some art on ArtPal.

See his works on Google Play.

Thank you for reading.