How To Bring Home The Blogging Bacon?

Lately, it has been tense at home. Making light of anything has been perilous.

“We’re going to get eight to ten inches, tonight,” Hope said, as I came through the door dusted like a jam biscuit.

“Oh goodie,” I say. “A porno!”

“Why the f*#@ do you always have to f%$#ing talk that way? Jesus f@#*ing Christ!”

“And I thought I was being X-rated?”

And then she left. San Diego, she said. I presume it was work, because the court papers haven’t arrived. Sheeesh. Where’s the levity, Caruthers? Where art it?

If she comes back, I have to act. You know, obsequiously worm my way back into her good graces. Apologize for turning the weather into a Jayden Jaymes movie. Novel idea, but unlike distance, money makes the heart grow fonder. And I need some, and thought I knew where to get it.

Confessions From The Man Cave has been live for a year—coddled in the omnipotent hands of Google, the world’s biggest aggregator of information since a Yenta played Chinese whispers. In the panic of trying to restore harmony to my temporarily broken eternal bond, I did as most debt-disabled plebs would: I raided my corporate piggy bank: dipped into the 401K of my life, that is this: my blog. So, off I trotted, hitting the “monetize” tab on the Confessions toolbar and settled down to see what one-year’s worth of blogging bacon looks like. 

$1.53.

I know. Hypothetically speaking, the hypothetical beers are on me. Let me reiterate and make clear, the decimal point hasn’t been incorrectly placed: one American dollar and fifty-three of its national cents.

Now, I’ve never seen myself as an easy pushover, a “mamaluke,” but Google has me by my blogging balls. In stroking my own ego with various wise-ass posts, I’m adding a little more dough to their already Everest-sized pile. Look at the site. I’ve got Justin Bieber selling tickets for his new film, NOT MINE—thanks Scooter, you schlemiel; Groupon is getting it on all over my postings, motorcycle insurance, Full Sail University flogging another useless MFA in creative writing; Living Social—oh, please; coupons for Arby’s and Boston Market; Google’s Chrome—the crafty fuckers; relationship counseling—funny. How did they know? And finally, Netflix, bringing up the rear that’s getting royally shafted by the princes of Silicone Valley.

Taking me as the model for this virtual revenue stream, it’s hard to imagine that blogging can pay. And, if you want to make bank, having a strategy is golden. Dan Zarrella, of DanZarrella.com, a clever marketing wonk, has some cunning plans to up your blogging game and get seen. Tip #1: publish over the weekend. Why? Because people, who aren’t wonks, have time on their hands and instead of doing something different with those hands that have just been released from an 80-hour work-week, working for $11 an hour, they can put them to use doing the same thing in their free time: being online. Ah, the clang of money. Can’t you just hear it? What kind of content should you post? Tip #2: let me put it this way, Danny boy’s stats show that the topics of media, learning and anything with a positive spin on it is three times less popular than your favorite and mine: sex. Yes, blogging on hanky-panky definitely puts a glide in readers’ strides. So if you wrote a how-to on having sex with people in the media—Bill O’Reilly with a hard piece of black rubber comes to mind—in a positive light, you’d be a blogging phenom. Tip #4, the most shareable word in the online vocabulary is “Facebook.” The least shareable word is “vs.” The list of most shareable words from mah to wow are; Obama, first, top, media, Apple, you, video, best, says, big, bill, health, how, world, most, why and Facebook. In fact, if you wrote and spoke in only those words you’d be a rich gibbering freak. Isn’t that what we’re all striving to be? Try it. Write a sentence including all the above and I’ll publish them. That way I can make money off your hard work. Isn’t that how the Internet works? Original content? Oh, really? Okay. My bad.

If word games aren’t your bag, I suggest an easier way to get seen. Record the evening network news and post it. They speak SEO. In fact, newspeak is marketingspeak, just with more pith and moment. And if all else fails write down all the people and things that Yahoo is trending. Today, it’s: Michelle Pfeiffer, Nancy Kerrigan, Dwayne Johnson, Christina Aguilera, Foreclosure and the Coca-Cola recipe. Cheery stuff, don’t you think?

Do all these things and you’ll be the next Michael Arrington of Techcrunch who makes $400,000 per month. I bet he could arrange the most searchable words faster than Google could make off chumps like me. He’s a Bling Blogger, that one. Perez Hilton is up there with $450,00 per month. And the Jay-Z of all Bling Bloggers is Arianna Huffington whose cyber paper makes a mind-googling $2.33M PER MONTH! People! What’s not to like about blogging?

So, how am I going to move the decimal point to the right until my $1.53 becomes the GDP of Mali? Trending? SEO-ing? Posting on weekends and bringing readers in at an absurd rate? You’re darn tootin’.

If I can swell my cash flow before Hope gets home, I’ll be out of the relationship doghouse and back down in my man cave in peace and quite before you can say, How top most Obama health media first world video, says big Apple bill. Facebook most, why you? Make sense? No. It makes dollars, ha ha.

Post Script: Samson came home, yesterday, from the movies. “Papa! I watched the new Justin Beaver movie. It was fantastic!” I didn’t correct him. Beaver, it is.