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Out here in the blogosphere where I stridently work to conquer the internet one reader at a time in a perpetual pursuit of sycophantic minions, the means by which potential readers have landed here on TharpSter.Org never ceases to amaze me. For those of you who keep up with my dispatches to the web, this should come as no surprise. For those of you who haven’t read Hamburger Helper Hijacker, it will be necessary for me to bring you up to speed. I do so completely out of a sense of benevolence, as you should have already read it anyway.
Recently, I’ve noticed that some very creative search terms have been used in the process of landing readers here. This was first noticed when a beloved reader whose identity I will never know landed here when they asked Google how to put a picture of Hamburger Helper on their Facebook profile picture. In addition to the event inspiring a blog, it also added a few more readers because I mentioned it on my own Facebook status that week. By writing that piece, I’ve begun a successful cornering of the market of Hamburger Helper searches on my favorite search engine. On a side note, I would like to send a shout out to the good people at Hamburger Helper. I’m still waiting to hear from you about an endorsement deal. I could make you people proud. Just sayin’.
The occasion of gaining readership in this manner has been quite an unexpected, yet pleasant surprise. When I launched TharpSter.Org just a few short months ago, I had every intention of focusing the site on the political landscape of the day. I figured I would publish my assorted opinion pieces, and show up on all of the search engines when people google things like “Obama” and “universal healthcare”.
The problem with achieving that goal is that it becomes tricky to come up with original commentary on the day’s events when a given subject matter has already been served up as the fodder of others in the blogosphere. Sadly, the news events of this last Thursday and Friday were pure gold for a blogger in my position. First, there was the whole deal with David Letterman discussing his personal life on his show in what by my account is act 3 in an orchestrated effort to boost his ratings. The first two acts were his suggestion that Alex Rodriguez had committed an act of statutory rape on one of the daughters of Sarah Palin, and then his landing Barack Obama as a guest on his show. Something tells me there will be other stunts in the near future. The second event which could have inspired me to utter about 1000 words in your direction was the rejection upon the city of Chicago by the International Olympic Committee on Friday. I had already dedicated web space to the event a few days before the rejection in Snap To & Pay Attention. My only comment from the post mortem point of view which would explain the rejection is the suggestion that maybe the IOC is racist. It only makes sense. Anyone who criticizes the Obamas must be doing so out of racist borne machinations. Jimmy Carter said so.
But, I digress.
As much as I would love to offer up my daily commentary to the political landscape, such as what has happened in the last few days, I feel compelled to leave such activity to those who have the time to upload their sentiments as soon as the events happened. Otherwise I’m just jumping on the subject matter bandwagon.
So with the original goal of having my political blogs appearing in the top 10 search results on Google somewhat set aside, I began focusing on writing about anything that came to mind instead of a specific subject matter. As a result, I’ve generated a variety of content based on whatever goofy notion ricocheted around between my ears on any given day. Up until this last month, my readership primarily has been generated from two different sources; word of mouth and mentions of the site on various social networking sites in discussion forums. Up to a point, I was the only person telling others about the site. After about a month, I mentioned it to a few people at work, who then told a few other people, and so on. It was like getting my own Amway distributorship without having to sell the soap or convince someone that it wasn’t a shifty pyramid scheme. To those of you at work who have passed the word, you have my eternal gratitude. Thank you very much.
It would seem that now, TharpSter.Org has taken on the ability to appear on a search result for more unique terms which I never planned or expected. In addition to the Hamburger Helper search landing this site in the top 10, a few more are starting to appear.
The term “Kinky Math” lands me at number 4 on Google. I’m not quite sure why people keep searching that combination of words, but it has shown up as a mainstay in my blog stats since I published Kinky Math on September 1, 2009.
Someone recently searched “Bud Stoop Singer” and found me at number 20 on Google. As a result, they read Real Men of Genius.
Just the other day “The Fleshy Void” revealed me at number 17 on Google, and led a reader to The TharpSter TreadMill.
Now if those search terms weren’t creative enough, today’s result was truly inspirational when a surfer with a lot of patience and veracity typed “dinka lactate” into Google. Ideally, if you’re searching out something like this you’re most likely going to find what you’re looking for in the first 20 results. My first search of the same term found Cultural Diversity linked at number 92. Just to summarize, someone not only searched for that phrase on Google today, but they also cycled through about 10 pages of results and chose to read what I had to say about the subject. I find that to be pretty cool.
Overall, I don’t know if these are honest searches or something else. For all I know, some of my readers are picking some of my more colorful word choices out of the gene pool derived from my soliloquies and searching them out to see what comes up. Whether it’s on purpose or not, I say keep it up. I want to see how creative these search results will get.
