I know a little bit about SEO, and I consider my blog somewhat more successful than average, but every now and then, the way the internet works just surprises me.
I just finished my second best month ever in terms of readership, thanks to a couple of random flukes (the first best month, by the way, came from having StumbleUpon sending 1,700 people to my blog in one day--also kind of a random fluke).
Fluke of the month #1: Sometime towards the end of May, all the EFY kids came to Provo. They bore down on us like a swarm of pre-pubescent squirrels with ADHD who were trying really hard to impress members of the opposite squirrel gender (seriously EFY kids, if you were to take a moment and look at all of you from the outside-in, you'd realize that you're trying waaay too hard to impress people). And for whatever reason, about 654 people Googled "EFY kids" and came to my blog to look at this image:
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| This happens to be on the first page of my 'efy kids' Google image search. |
I find this ironic, because I didn't make this image. Some dude on the BYU Memes Facebook page did. All I did is find it and share it. And my blog went crazy for it.
Then, last week, another 141 people came to my blog in one
hour, just because someone posted about my
BYU Memes post to the
Cougarboard.
So this is what the last month on my blog has looked like:
So here's what I find so weird about this - last month, I put up two Draw Something Posts (here's the
first one about Hitler, and here's
the second one about Batman). Both of them have drawn quite a few people to my blog. These two posts contain orignal art that I'm fairly proud of.
However, the biggest traffic driver to my blog was a post where I just copied a bunch of other people's jokes onto my blog. In academia, this is called plagiarism.
The second biggest driver to my blog was someone else telling people that
I did a really good job at
plagiarizing other people's work!
By the way, this is exactly how Reddit works.
The moral of this story is that my original content will never be as compelling as someone else's, and that the internet rewards plagiarism.
Thanks, internet?