The Big 100

Barring some sort of Webosphere meltdown, Murphblog will, in the very near future, receive its 100th hit. Of course, this assumes that ClustrMaps has their crap together and is actually giving me an accurate count. (I prefer to think it is severely underreporting.) A quick glance at the map shows that I get most of my traffic from two states, Michigan and New York. This is easily explained. The Michigan visitors are my mom, my wife, and possibly my sister-in-law. The New York visitors are agents and editors of the most prestigious agencies and pub houses who would love to offer me represention and a ridiculous pub contract that I could never earn out if I would just hurry up and submit my masterpiece already. To these folks, I would like to simply say, "Patience." Greatness cannot be rushed. (And I've still got an awesome fart joke I need to work into the manuscript.)

I don't know about you, but the phrase "I don't know about you" kind of annoys me. So let's go with this one: If you're like me (and really, why wouldn't you be?), you believe that round numbers should be celebrated, even if they are rather anemic. This would be a good time to offer my many readers a chance to offer suggestions on just how I should celebrate when the momentous feat occurs (My guess: 7:07 am tomorrow). And I would love to do that, but I'd only get, like, one suggestion and that would be pretty lame. (Plus, I might feel obligated to go through with that one idea and it might be really stupid).

So instead of that I'm going to brainstorm some ways to increase traffic to the blog. If you are a person who would like to suggest some strategies in addition to the ones below, have at it. Although, let's face it, if you really know what you're talking about then you should already have a successful blog, in which case the best thing you can do is not offer some lame idea, but just link to Murphblog on your already successful site. And if you don't have a successful blog, then why bother commenting at all? I already know how to run an unpopular blog, I don't need your help.

Aside---You may be turned off by my constant moaning about the lack of hits this blog receives, but I'm wagering your pity will outweigh your annoyance and you will send all your friends emails that say, "You have to check out this whiner's blog." Why would your friends want to read such a thing? Don't know. But lots of people read this, so I figure it's worth a shot.

Now, let's get to it...

WAYS TO MAKE MURPHBLOG AS POPULAR AS THIS

1. Contests with triple sweet prizes. Something like this: I'll post one of those super-duper close up photographs of an everday object and you have to guess what it is. Whoever gets it right wins one of Travolta's jets. To-do: see if JT is willing to donate a jet.

2. Naked pictures of celebrities.

3. Pretend I am someone else. As writing blogs go, the most popular ones tend to be those of people on the "inside." Sometimes, these people remain anonymous. I could pretend to be an agent's assistant. From the looks of things, I would mostly have to complain about the stupid things people put in query letters and then offer my advice on how to write a good one (Not that I can, but I know what you're supposed to do).

4. Publish a novel that teenage girls adore.

5. Become an annoyance on multiple message boards by shamelessly promoting my blog. People will check it out just to see who the jerk is and then they'll become hooked. Kind of like how Simon Cowell got popular.

6. Get lots of different Google accounts and set up multiple Blogger identities. Then use these identities to comment on my blog. Browsers will see the staggering number of comments and decide it must be something they're missing out on. Hooked again.

Well, that's all I got. I think they're all pretty good ideas except for number 4. In my experience, chicks don't dig the fart joke.


Literary Wisdom of the Day:

"You can be the Babe Ruth of wrestling and still have something to prove."

--Hulk Hogan, in his book Hollywood Hulk Hogan