How To Instantly Make Everyone Love You and Lose 10 Pounds by Tomorrow and Make 1 Million Dollars in One Month

Alternate Title: I, Not Robot

The dread. I’m trying to learn more about making my blog searchable and web-friendly. The number one tip is: Get rid of your cutesy titles.

I like my cutesy titles, even if most of the time they are an inside joke with myself. That’s why I started this blog, for entirely selfish reasons. I needed to sort out the heavy emotions of the past year, I needed some time out, I needed to feel like 5 to 10 people a day I didn’t know thought I was kind of cool. Eventually I started writing somewhat coherently which is why I think BrazenCareerist picked me up.

Then I noticed they kept changing my blog titles for their site. “It’s cool…” I thought, “otherwise the robots won’t find me.” It’s saying stuff like “otherwise the robots won’t find me” that make a blog completely unsearchable, but I suppose it makes a blog more recognizeable to humans.

Steve Pavlina, a straight talking (yet frustratingly long-winded) author who focuses on what he calls Personal Developement for Smart People, talks about congruency all the time. His article about monetizing and optimizing your blog is pretty forthright. He makes a great point, don’t be half-assed about it. You wanna make money with your blog? Then be balls to the walls. Write great content. And learn SEO. And learn enough HTML/CSS to be dangerous, and all the other things that make your blog searchable. In other words, let the robots find you.

I'm not so much looking to make money from my blog, but the article made me think: Would it be incongruent to ditch my cute titles, awkward word pairings, and oft-meandering babble for more clean and concise language and focus? It would certainly make for a more internet friendly site. To most, it would not be such a major issue, SEO or flail, but I’m suffering some minor trauma over this.

I submitted a few of my blog posts to StumbleUpon the other day. I had roughly 200 hits in the next hour.

I wailed to Mike, “Oh no! I’ve got fake traffic, I hate it!”

Mike was puzzled, “Why is that bad?”

“Because I didn’t earn it, those people don’t actually want to read my blog!”

Still confused he said, “Why would it matter? Doesn’t that just count as advertising? Does someone who puts up a billboard where 10,000 people drive past every day a fake for doing it? You’re just displaying what you’re selling, that’s all. Out of those 200, you might get someone who genuinely does like it.”

“Oh.”

So – there you go. There is no crime in monetizing, optimizing, publicizing, or otherwise improving your blog to share it with more people or make a buck. If you don’t make it easy for them – your voice won’t be heard, and isn’t that the whole point?