It’s now News, It’s FARK.
Last July I started working on ways to get traffic to my blog. I did the SEO stuff of tweaking Meta Tags, hitting the keywords, working on getting listed here, there and everywhere. I followed, as best as I could, that standard bit of advise about good content. I write everyday and usually try to tie it to something current.
So far as I can tell, none of that has anything to do with getting on the front page of FARK.
FARK is different from Digg and Reddit, in that there are no buttons to push to vote for a story. The Good People at FARK look at a story and decide if it is worthy of being on the Front Page. I have been submitting my blog posts to FARK for a few months now, so far as I know, none of them have been rejected, but none of them ever hit the FARK Front Page. Until now.
One key to FARKing success is in the headlines-such as:
First 450 people who show up at Cleveland’s convention centre this Saturday with a working handgun will get a $100 gas card. The first person to think this through will get $45,000 in gas cards
Homosexuality can be turned on and off in fruit flies, allowing them to just be flies
You might ask yourself what’s going through the mind of a man who walks around a flashing railroad signal while on the phone. If you answer “A locomotive,” you’d be right
My headlines for FARK have never been as great as these. The Headline for my FARK Front Page article was Altered States of Consciousness Without Drugs. Not exactly funny, but it does get to the point. I’m sure die hard FARKers could whip up something better in their sleep, which is an altered state of consciousness. Which leads to that whole issue of Quality Content.
I have been using subliminal, binaural, Mozart, and anything else I have read about for the past thirty years or so. I have used all the interesting and curious products that I wrote about in the Altered Consciousness post. I whipped up a top ten list and just barely made it. Problogger Darren Rowse is really big on writing lists-thanks for the idea Darren. I’m one of those small blogs Darren talks about with less than 2000 subscribers, but maybe one or two of the passing mob will pause to sign up for an RSS feed. You never know.
I spent a lot of time working on this post, it was not one of those that I banged out on my way out the door to work. And it was a lot longer than most of my posts. I put in a lot of links to this and that and gave my honest opinions about the technologies involved. I have always been a self help junkie, so this post was a natural for me to write.
It might be worth noting that I don’t submit all my posts to FARK-as I do with Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. FARK has a different feel for me from the other networks, they need something a little odd, a little silly, a little out there. And if you can whip up a great title, the story doesn’t need to be Shakespeare. But I do submit stuff on a semi-regular basis. If they never see what you have to offer, they never have a chance to put it on the FARK front page.
My Post Hit the FARK Front Page sometime during the end of the Cowboys loss to the Giants, around 6:30 or 7:00 I think. It is now about 10:30 the next morning. Traffic so far from FARK-10254. Normal daily traffic for the past few week-600 a day.
Thanks FARK.
