The Whole Porn Star Tweet Thing

Two months ago, I started a slightly ridiculous blogging project with the intention of rejuvinating my diminishing blog stats. A month later, and nine thousand hits later, I uploaded a post describing how I'd garnered these page views. I'd been using a site that amalgamates the tweets of hundreds of adult actresses and actors as they are uploaded. This site is called Porn Star Tweet, and it was a massive benefit to me.

After uploading this post, I showed the post to all contributors and many of the 251 people mentioned in the post- 39, to be exact- retweeted it out of kindness. They are truly awesome for that. Partly due to this, the Porn Star Tweet post quickly became my second top-hit post, behind only a short piece also about Twitter publicity (Manchester is GREAT only received a splurge of hits because of a picture I used). Within a month of uploading the Porn Star Tweet post, my overall page stats were into six figures.

Take a look at the comments under the post. Some people are impressed. Some are angry or disappointed. Others just think I'm a nutter. Tomleecee is right that not everyone wants to know about Manchester night life or creative writing, or has an interest in Japanese-style short-form poetry. People who follow porn stars live all over the English-speaking world, mostly, so my Manchester-based posts won't be massively relevant to everyone. Regardless of this, though, I've had more comments on the Porn Star Tweet post- by far- than I've had on any other post I've written, so I must have had some kind of effect on people. It wasn't just a case of people jumping on, taking a look and jumping off again.

Away from my blog, at least one person unfollowed me on Twitter, so strong were their feelings towards the project. This wasn't a massive problem, seeing as I gained over 200 in the course of the month.

Lots of people who have been reading my blog for some time are bloggers themselves, and bloggers usually DO have an interest in finding ways of garnering page views to their site. The Porn Star Tweet post was just one of a number of posts that I've written that showed how to draw people in to your blog. Still today- when I'm no longer marketing that post specifically- it's still being hit on more than any other post I've written.

People have recently asked me- why do this project? What's the end result for all this? Why do you want these page views?

The answer: I always wanted to write for lots of people. I never wanted to write for just a few people here and there- I wanted to write something that was accessible, helpful or interesting to millions of readers across the English speaking world. Recently, I've tried all sorts of Twitter-related activities to boost my blog's profile, and they seem to have worked, to their own degrees. The Porn Star Tweet post is just another, but it's by far the most successful- no matter how crazy an idea it is.