DASFO

That’s right. We adopted a hamster. We named him Dasfo, after perhaps the greatest blog in the world. Or the ancient medieval ruler of modern day Bolivia. You wouldn’t know.

A Hog.

So let’s be honest, with the success of my last post, 3 Instruments You Aren’t Cool Enough To Play I was kind of intimidated about creating a new post. After all, this post sucks. You can already tell that because there’s no witty title (or is there), there’s no sarcastic humor (or is there), and most importantly, there are no lists.  However, I’ve come to terms with my forseen lack of sucess and your lack of support, so I’ve resorted to self pitty and reverse psychology.

Whatever you do, DO NOT REGISTER YOURSELF VIA THE LINK TO THE RIGHT. I urge you not to, because then I’d be able to keep in contact with you. I might be able to email you when a new post comes out (which you would likely not enjoy), and I might be able to offer you free things via silly contests that I am sure none of you would partake in. Now that I didn’t get that off my chest, it’s on to the next topic.

The internet is fickle. I bolded that because half of you won’t read all these small words. You just want to see big funny, and pictures. I bet if you were reading this far, you were expecting an interesting story to be told, something pertaining to the picture of a hog feeding. Well I apologize, as the hog feeding has absolutely nothing to do at all with what I am posting. It was to prove a point, that you may not be here had you not been wondering what the hell that hog was doing. This brings me to the focal point of this topic.

How to create a successful blog by taking advantage of the nature of the internet.

1. List everything. People love numbers. I don’t know why. They’re just magically attracted to titles such as “3 Things You Should Never Place Underneath a Neighbor’s Car.” If you treated them like they were respectable adults who could keep count of your worthy advice on their own, they would leave you. Leave you. Like cold, heartless, self-orphaning orphans.
2. Put lots of shiny pictures. Ok they don’t have to be shiny, but it’s a plus. The best way to keep a person with ADHD reading your article is to riddle it with puzzling pictures, and then explain the pictures after you’ve said everything you wanted to say. People surfing through blogs are either searching for something useful, or funny. If you aren’t smart, and you don’t have the funny, then you must puzzle them. Write an article about the war of 1812 and riddle it with pictures of Donald Duck (if that isn’t a copywright issue. cough.), or your own hand drawn renditions of this loveable Disney creation, and they’ll listen. They’ll may hate you afterwards, and lose sleep over your improbable complexities, but they’ll pass history.
3. Give them something to click. Enter Dasfo, the loveable hamster. I realized that the majority of things to do on my page are reading and clicking links. I don’t have any super fun games or anything, so instead I’m going to let people click on my loveable hamster buddy, and feed him or make him exercise before he gets the chance to digest his food. Be considerate. Bottom line? People love clicky things. They like games, because they get to click and it’s amusing, so put some on your site. After all, if you don’t provide the clicky games, people will leave in search of them, so just give it to them before they can get bored.

5. Give them something to complain about. Before you freak out and care about commenting, I skipped the number 4 on purpose. If you screw something up, or write something absurdly selfish or opinionated in such a manner as to provoke a response from internet people, they will fight back. There are two classes of internet people, the good, and the not good. The not good people will harass you and call you stupid, denouncing your opinion and stating random useless facts at any chance they can. Often times instead of the aforementioned they will just assault you with curse words and poorly constructed sentences, double whammied with a lack of, or unnecessary, punctuation. If you so much as slightly hint at tolerating homosexuality, you are guaranteed a visit from the token belligerent religious activist who will undoubtedly invoke the powerful, and not slightly ignorant or humiliating phrase, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Enter the people who will argue to the death and defend you. They will cite your work as if it were a godsend in order to smite down the infidels who created an immature post, and fouled the sanctity of your immortal blog. They will use big words correctly, thus destroying comic relief until the argument continues. These are not the good internet people. They are annoying as well and care entirely too much about electronic media. After all do you think that bloggers really care about their own content? Hah. Good internet users are the people who silently watch and chuckle at blogs, click on Google Ads, and send their payment promptly after completing bids on eBay.

1. Be Redundant Redundant. Internet people are on the internet for only a handful of reasons. One of those is to laugh at pictures of cats. One of those is to laugh at FAIL pictures. Perhaps the reason for a dignified internet surfer would be to seek out open source software. Whatever their needs may be, Google the solution, copy it into notepad, and change the order (the words too if you’re over ambitious.) Internet people love redundancy redundancy. They like to see the same pictures 5000 times, but only if they’re in large collections. They love to be told the same jokes as that other website they love. They love to learn about the same free software they already have installed on their computer. Plain and simple, if you’re unique, you’re looking at about maybe 30 unique visitors a month. Post a picture of a mock motivational poster off the first page of Google Images, and you’re in the thousands. thousands.
2. Blog about conceptual things that don’t exist yet, but pretend like it’s already changing the world. Make sure you write about cars that get 2314124 mpg, but are currently only computer models. This way you beat everyone to the chase. Internet people are snobs. They want to be the first to tell everyone about the thing they saw on the internet that you don’t have. If you don’t know of any innovative conceptual technology, make it up. “This just in, rumor says Sony is set to release a tv that runs off the energy from old paper plates, via a paper plate compost container attached to the set.” Now just photoshop a picture of a really expensive tv that you haven’t seen before because you can’t afford it onto a paper shredder and you’re the new hot topic that people will love to debate about. You’re the going green blog. You’re a hit.
3. Go Green. You don’t have to go green personally. Just write about it. Keep them in front of the computer for as long as they can wasting valuable electricity and destroying the environment with no regard so that you can talk about green things. Just google the word green every once in a while and copy and paste an article onto your blog. Google will hate you, social networking sites will love you, which do you care for more? People love saving the environment. Heck, pledge to plant a tree for every visitor to your site, and take a picture of a forest. Then resist the urge to hack all of your arborial friends into paper. It’s pretty much the same.

That should be enough hints for you to successfully start your own Dasfo. It’s late. It’s snowing, and I’m going to go watch this hamster do cute things. Goodbye for now Dasfo.