Ten thousand. That is the number of hits that The Dassler Effect passed this evening, which is fairly remarkable considering this iteration only began in late September.

Those numbers are pretty good, unless you compare them with a blog like Stuff White People Like (which, interestingly enough, uses the identical template to my own), which appears to have started on January 18, 2008 and has 60,045,604. Yes, that is 60 million and change! And that blog has a gazillion comments and has spawned a book and book tour. Wow!

That all goes to show you that blogging success is a rather relative thing. It sometimes can be determined objectively, as with the example in the previous paragraph, but largely it depends on whether the author and his or her readers are satisfied, be they 5 or 10,000.

I can tell you that I am satisfied. I am very pleased with the aims of and response to this blog. Obviously, I pay attention to the number of hits and try to increase them through various means, but fundamentally I want to go beyond that and create posts that have meaning on some level for readers. And if that is achieved the numbers are not important. Well, almost 😉

Having talked about hit numbers, I might as well use this post as a mini tutorial on how to increase them. If you want to, that is. Here is a list.

• Create good content. This is the hard bit 😉
• Create categories for your posts.
• Tag, tag, tag, tag your posts, liberally but accurately. See tags on this post below.
• Use WordPress. This is debatable, of course, but, seriously, it is a sweet platform.
• Register your site with Google blog search and other blog directory sites like Blog Explosion. There are many others.
• Put meaningful links to your blog on Facebook status updates.
• Mirror your blog on Facebook.
• Be a faithful blog reader, make comments, and leave your address.
• Email folk about special events like contests or special posts.
• Have contests with prizes, quality judges, and interesting premises.

In truth, it has really been the last two of these which have really allowed this blog to get to 10,000 hits so fast. If you were to take away the views of contest related posts, I think the number would much, much less.

Here are a couple of facts.

Busiest day?: Friday, May 1, 2009, 235 hits

Number one non-contest-related post? Wait for it…….

(Mis)Appropriations?: Hennapalooza, Vampire Weekend, and White Hip Hop

And the number one search term?

mpdg

I know some of you are groaning right about now.  However, the greatest category of search terms all have to with some odd combination henna or old Pakistani men or hair dyeing in some fashion. I was puzzled with why this was the case and with why certain other terms led to my blog with greater frequency. Then I realized that the searchers must have been using an image search engine. In that case, then my results appear much higher in the list of results. So, I suppose posting a lot of photos and giving them descriptive file names (as opposed to the number your camera gives them) is another tip in in getting more hits.

If you are really curious about the top posts and search terms (there are some interesting ones) on this blog, see the images at the bottom of this post.

Well, thus ends the behind the scenes tour of The Dassler Effect. If your are interested in blogging and this has helped you out, great. If you have been bored to tears, well, photos and such will be back soon.

Finally, thank you to all who have read/viewed a post here. It means a lot to me.