This blog is waking up. This blog is stirring. This blog just said, “Five more minutes.” This blog is snoring. This blog just threw the alarm across the room. This blog is staggering around like the Men Without Hats “Safety Dance” video, which has 18 million hits and 14,000 comments on YouTube even though the song was released in 1983 and was long ago certified stupid.
This blog wants to go viral in 2016!
I have done my homework. I’ve studied page views, impressions, sessions, users, earned media, in-kind media, and other words I can’t define. I’ve disrupted the classes and snoozed through the seminars. I’ve taken everything I’ve learned about how to become an Internet sensation and distilled it into the following list:
- Headlines with numbers outperform headlines without numbers. Done.
- Adding even one image to your post almost doubles your visibility online…especially when your subject is kittens. Done.
- Include links to time-wasting reportage about useless shit. Done.
- Longer posts are more popular than shorter. If writing long is wrong I don’t wanna be right.
- Female bylines go viral twice as often as male bylines. Problem area.
- Female writers writing about their dysfunctional sex lives exponentially increases likes, comments, and shares. Problem area.*
- Dig up your old content, shock it with electricity, and push it out the door. Done.
- Invoke awe, laughter, or amusement (1). Or invoke awe, anger, or anxiety (2). I’d rather invoke Thor because I really want to borrow Mjölner.
- Ten is the magic number for lists.
* The trifecta: A current or former Mrs. Trump writing about her dysfunctional sex life.
Thank you, loyal readers, for hanging in there with me. I hope your 2016 is off to a solid start with thousands of new Twitter followers you can retweet me to!
Here’s what I wrote about in 2015:
Women
Dionne Warwick, Roberta Flack, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner, Joan Armatrading
Men
Al Green, Bill Withers, Donny Hathaway, and Lou Rawls
Real men
Boys
Books
The two most popular blog topics: Sex and motherhood
Sex and motherhood: Still out of stock
Misc.
Still sacred after all these years
One does not simply walk into Mordor
Run-DMSteve 
Mr. Run-Consider writing as an alter-ego or transformational self. I have a cross-dressing friend, whom I’ve known since we were 14 years old; it’s seems ‘kinda like’ play dress-up?…you could do the same and use the byline ‘WANDA’ OR ‘IVANA’! This could solve several of your ‘problem areas’ noted above. ‘Stevie Bieler’…’Stevie Nicks’: just how much are they all that different? BTW…I didn’t notice any kitty pictures accompanying your last post. If you need any I have a file full of them that you are welcome to borrow.
How different am I from Stevie Nicks? I could borrow Special D’s scarves and we would soon find out! No, wait, I’ve just been informed that we’re not going to conduct this experiment. What? You have a gun? Well then why aren’t you occupying a bird sanctuary?
(PS: Follow the link at the end of point 2 for the kitty pictures, Friend of Cross-Dresser Dude!)
With a blog post so nice, I had to read it twice. It’s up in two different browser tabs so you get an extra page view.
I LOVE “Safety Dance” AND kit-tens.
You’ve inspired me to write a blog post titled “In 5 minutes do 10 things to improve your life 88% every day.”
You’ve improved on my headline, that’s for sure! Someone should link to you from HuffPost. Thanks for contributing the cats!
“Safety Dance” is so stupid that I remember doing it at a party in a house on Phinney Ridge in 1983 (I thought I was going to get laid) and when the song was over every person in that living room, including me (I was sure of it), demanded we do it again, which we did and this time we circled the house about 20 times. OK, some people didn’t demand it. We probably made some people go home. Somebody tripped in the dark, it was wicked cold outside, and I remember the neighbors expressing dissatisfaction. Also, I was wrong. Still fun.
BTW, Weird Al’s parody of “Safety Dance” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkFMMCEa5AE) is one of the best of his earliest parodies.
Hat tip to an old acquaintance, the music critic Donald Keller, for calling the band Men Without Ideas.
Yippie Ki-Yay!
I should make T-shirts for the people who actually read this thing!! I don’t know what I did to deserve such attention…if I did know, I’d go viral!