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Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.
Thursday 06/17/2004
How to have a popular GayBoi blog (advice from an inexpert)
I’ve been checking stats for the site. They suck. My attempt at maintaining both a livejournal blog & a diaryland journal has worked, cause hey, I’ve been posting entries on a more regular basis, but it’s also failed, cause few people are bothering to check the sites out. Folks can’t even be bothered to stumble over ‘em while googling for porn, not even outlandish fetishist porn. It’s been ages since since I’ve had a hit for someone surfing for teen boys who fart during sex.
Oh well. I’ve been looking around at far more popular sites than this, and have come up with some simple rules for having a popular blog. The first of which should really be don’t be a gay man, because that just limits your audience far too much. Then again, some folks like being a big fish in a little pond, so with that in mind, these rules are specifically on How to have a popular GayBoi Blog.
The rules:
1. Have a blog. Obvious sounding ain’t it? But what this really refers to, is to not bother with an online journal. Journals tend to be long and in this modern day and age who the heck has time to read an entire page worth of material? Shockingly, there are occasions when length is not good. Stick to short entries.
2. Be a boi. I have no clue what it means to be a boi, but they appear to be wildly popular, and love linking to each other, so give up your manhood for boidom.
3. Be white. Popular gay culture demands that gay men of color be seen and not heard. Popular gay culture prefers that this occur while the gay man of color in question is dancing on top of a bar while wearing skimpy white underwear, assuming he is attractive that is. If not, then he gets to be a minor character hovering around the background somewhere. Unless you are a drag queen of color, then you still hover in the background, but get to look good while doing so.
If being white means lying, then lie. After all it’s not as if you didn’t lie about your age in every single one of your online personal ads.
4. Be young (but not too young). A tricky thing age, if you’re too old no one will care about you, but if you’re too young, only other teenagers (or creepy old men) will bother with you. The perfect gay age used to be 21, but thanks to aging baby boomers refusing to age gracefully, the perfect gay age is now 24. Interestingly enough, in the straight world, the perfect age is 35, but that would be really pushing it for a gay
5. Be hot. Remember back in high school when you realized that all the popular kids were also all the attractive kids? Well, the same rule still applies.
Only hot studly guys have large readerships. In order to let people know you are hot you must have pics of yourself plastered all over your site. It’s not totally necessary to have webcams in every room of your house, but it also doesn’t hurt. By the way, at least half of your pics must be shirtless poses, so either get to the gym, or break out the photoshop.
6. Be single. Being Hot is good, but being Hot & single is even better. If readers think they have a chance with you, you will be adored. If you insist on not being single, lie, or at least repeatedly announce that you are in an open relationship, then post pics of you and your studly lover so readers can have threesome fantasies. If your lover isn’t studly, replace him.
7. Date, a lot. If people think you are popular, then you are popular.
8. Have sex, a lot. More specifically, write about having sex a lot. If people start leaving comments calling you are a slut, don’t worry; they’re just jealous ‘cause they aren’t getting any. You must be careful with this tactic. There is a thin line between sexy blog and porn site. Cross the line and you risk loosing your more prudish readers and more importantly, folks who have to worry about workplace safe materials, which quite frankly is the majority of your readers. Then again, you can always charge for porn, so the option for profit is always there.
If explicit is not in your nature, you can always go the coy route, and be a huge tease by acknowledging your highly successful sex life, but never going into actual sordid details. Regardless of which option you choose, hard or soft, never admit to being a bottom. Just assume that all of your readers are bossy bottoms, and think of how it would spoil their fun if they found out you were one as well.
9. Be highly political or highly vapid. There are three choices here, crazy liberal, repressed republican, or airhead. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose as long as don’t declare yourself a middle of the road moderate, since your readers want passion in your beliefs, no matter how idiotic. Even if you are a queer-bashing, self-hating, neo Fascist, conservative,
10. Be obsessively detailed or impossibly obscure. Another choice to make, so either expose your life just short of documenting bowl movements, or write about absolutely everything except your life, revealing nothing personal, other than you are highly attractive and desirable, that is.
11. Don’t have a links list. Treat ‘em mean and keep ‘em keen is the lesson to learn here. Ignore the masses and and they will love you for it. If you must have a links list, then for it must only be to other popular blogs. It doesn’t matter if dropping a link to your boyfriend’s site will piss him off. If he doesn’t have what it takes to increase your numbers, lose both it and him, after all, if his readership is low, he’s probably not that hot anyway.
12. Threaten to shut down your site at least once a quarter. Make sure to make a big deal out of it, so that your readers will beg you not to.
13. Shut down your site at least once a year. Just don’t forget to actually come back. Don’t do this more than once a year, or else you’ll get a rep as being prissy, and prissy is not sexy.
14. Date a popular blogger. In fact, date several. Just not at the same time. This way you’ll be guaranteed hits as they are obligated to write about you, and more importantly, link to you. If the other blogger is more popular than you are, be nice when it comes to breaking up and moving on to the next one. If you’re the more popular one, then don’t bother with civility, because the looser was just using you to get more hits to his site.
and finally,
15. Never write an entry where you complain that no one is visiting your site. No one wants to read whiny crap like that.
Okay, that’s more than enough of this. I really should be packing because John and I are heading off for vacation tomorrow. The next couple of weeks will be spent with friends in a wet and wintery Santiago Y Buenos Aires, so new entries here will be nonexistent for a while. However, assuming internet access and inclination, I could conceivably put up stuff at the live journal site. It’s unlikely, but it is possible.
I’ll be back soon with some stories to share, in the meantime, go visit the the various folks on the various links to the left and on the links page. They’re much better than this place.
be well mi gente,
nico