The Propheteer

So I started blacklisting the IPs that all my comment spam was coming from at the firewall itself. Then I blocked Yahoo’s robots and spiders. Mostly because they were constantly hitting my site, every day, every half hour, and ignoring my robots.txt file. I got sick of it, and I’ve gotten maybe two yahoo hits since I started the site up. Unfortunately, now that I’ve gotten rid of most of the Junk hits, I’ve more or less gotten rid of my hits, period. Almost certainly this means I need to post more…but more than that, I wonder how one goes about growing an audience for their website. I mean, the sites down there on the right hand side of this page are sites I hit DAILY, and they often don’t post for days or weeks at a time. Most (if not all) of them are extraordinarily popular. And I read them all due to word of mouth. How did the word of mouth get STARTED? (I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that they’re almost all excellent writers. I’m not even going to get started on the self-deprecating bit about whether or not my writing has any value, quality, merit, or other word meaning “people should care about this”. Let’s just say that, when it comes down to it, I’m proud of the things I say, how I say them, and think other people would be interested if they took the time to read them. I’m also sometimes terrified by letting people read what I write. The conflict that creates, the cognitive dissonance I get every time I hit “post” is what makes me absolutely certain that I’m supposed to be writing.)

So….how do you get to be immensely popular, anyway?