Senate condemns ACORN; House expected to approve Hannah Giles bikini photos

Charles Johnson could not be reached for comment:

A poverty-rights group that has drawn the ire of conservatives suffered another setback in Washington on Monday when the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to deny it access to federal housing funds. . . .

"Poverty rights"? I guess that means ACORN fights for people's right to be poor. NTTAWWT, but I don't remember "poverty rights" in the Constitution. Let's see if we can find something a bit more fair and balanced:

A growing number of Republican lawmakers are calling for congressional hearings and IRS audits of ACORN following the release of three videotapes that show the group's employees offering advice to a "pimp" and a "prostitute" on how to skirt the law.
Rep. Steve King, R-IA, said a video released Monday that shows filmmaker James O'Keefe, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, getting advice from ACORN employees in Brooklyn, N.Y., on how to launder their earnings and avoid detection while running a prostitution business is "another reason to turn it up" on ACORN.

Much better. Now let's try Ed Morrissey:

Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) introduced an amendment to the HUD and Transportation appropriation bill to strip ACORN of all federal funding. A week ago, Johanns wouldn’t have gotten the amendment to the floor. Today, however, after three straight days of BigGovernment.com’s video exposés of ACORN offices in Washington DC, New York City, and Baltimore offering assistance to pimping, tax evasion, and trafficking in underage Salvadorean girls, Johanns not only got his vote — but he got an impressive bipartisan showing. The Senate passed the Johanns amendment 83-7

Wow, 83-7! Coincidentally, that's exactly the ratio of e-mails I'm getting in favor of my publishing the Hannah Giles bikini photo.

At this point, however, I owe a big hat-tip to Ace of Spades, who taught me almost everything I know about the running-gag method of building blog-reader loyalty. Ace blogs with personality and, though his actual self bears an oft-noted resemblance to an Ewok with a law degree, the outrageous humor of his online persona is what sets him apart from grim, humorless bloggers about whom we need not say anything specific at this point.

Humor wins. Humor persuades. And, as Ronald Reagan so often demonstrated, no humor is as winningly persuasive as self-deprecating humor. The guy who tells jokes on himself is telling others, "Hey, I comprehend that I am not exempt from the general ridiculousness of human folly." So when Ace jokes about swilling Valu-Rite vodka and beating up hobos -- he's notoriously hobophobic -- he invites readers to laugh at him, but also with him.

Ace is an acknowledged master of the running gag, and after a while, the running gag becomes an inside joke. Longtime readers bust a gut when he references the Paul Anka Integrity Trip, and part of the joy of recycling an old joke is the fact that only longtime readers will get it. This rewards reader loyalty, you see. "Membership has its privileges," and the longtime AOSHQ Moron gets a special payoff when Ace throws in a Scandi-hating reference to filthy lutefisk-gobblers.

Blog junkies may never get to this level of abstract theory about what makes AOSHQ so darned good, but if you're a middle-aged journalist who just quit the newspaper business and you need to grow a blog readership fast, you're like the engineer at KIA trying to reverse-engineer a Jaguar XJ. That was the kind of raw desperation that led to "How to Get a Million Hits On Your Blog In Less Than A Year."

OK, so one of the terms that Ace taught me is "blog-o-bucks." Readers of a major blogger like AOSHQ picture Ace living the high life in posh surroundings, lighting his imported cigars with twenty-dollar bills and generally, as P.J. O'Rourke once said, "farting through silk."

Alas, it's not as lucrative and as glamorous as all that and, despite his outrageously enviable success, Ace is unlikely to be buying a Gulfstream anytime soon.

If longtime readers suspect this is all leading up to a request that you hit the tip jar -- hey, there's your payoff. Membership has its rewards, and Dave C. at Point of a Gun shows why your contributions to the blog-o-bucks are desperately needed -- to help us blogger dudes hang out with biker chicks who come to D.C. for protest marches.

You really should hit the tip jar, because it enables me to play the comic role of the over-the-hill ladies' man, trying to convince himself he's still got the magic. Which is why I'm so grateful to lady-bloggers like Barbara "Angry Mob" Espinosa:

[T]he night was icing on the cake my new best married friend the infamous Robert Stacy McCain aka The Other McCain in the blog world and famous author arranged what he calls a Smittypalooza at the Army Navy Club. . . . This group of blogger's are the most knowledgable, nicest patriotic Americans you could ever meet. We had a wonderful time talking with a group of intelligent good looking guys who carried on conversations about current events with a few jokes and jabs at each thrown in to keep them on their toes. Afterwards a few of us went out for a bite to eat and always a gentlemen as well as a scholar Wombat Rampant walked us back to our hotel as The Other McCain drove over to the hotel to help me with my computer.

"Help me with my computer." Nudge, nudge. I bet you say that to all the bloggers, Barbara. IYKWIMAITYD. While Mrs. Other McCain is usually jealous of my girlfriends drinking buddies Internet consulting clients, for some reason, she's OK with Barbara.

Oh, yeah -- the string of crossed-out descriptors is another running gag. Schtick, as they say. (Or is it schtupp? I'm confused. Maybe I need to buy a Yiddish-English dictionary. So hit the tip jar.) You might have noticed that Mrs. Other McCain's jealousy is also schtick. Or schtupp. Whatever . . . hit the freaking tip jar.

Now, you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with Hannah Giles bikini photos. Well, if it weren't for Hannah Giles portraying the role of "Kenya" the prostitute, the Senate wouldn't have condemned ACORN. After the ACORN video made news, I started getting random Google hits from people searching for her photo -- which I had posted in July's coverage of the annual YAF conference.

As soon as I realized this, I posted another Hannah Giles photo and, almost immediately, commenters began requesting Hanna Giles bikini photos -- another payoff to loyal readers, who know how I shamelessly milked curiosity about Sarah Palin bikini pics and Carrie Prejean nude for traffic.

This involves a Stupid Blogger Trick known as the Google-bomb, and is also part of the reward of Rule 5, which rivals Rule 2 in popularity in "How to Get a Million Hits On Your Blog In Less Than A Year."

Rule 5A: Everybody loves a pretty girl. And the category of "everybody" includes sick freaks who search for naked photos of celebrities. (Cynthia Yockey actually gets Bea Arthur nude traffic. These people are sick, I tell you.)

These freaks are not just sick, but stupid. Perversion makes people stupid, as you might have concluded from watching TV shows about idiots who haven't yet figured out that every 13-year-old girl in an Internet chat room is either (a) an undercover cop or (b) Chris Hansen of "Dateline NBC."

So it isn't necessary to actually post nude photos of celebrities in order to get Internet traffic from idiots looking for nude photos of celebrities. If a female celebrity makes news, or if any good-looking woman suddenly becomes famous, the smart blogger who acts fast can get traffic by betting on the predictability that perverse idiots will be seeking nude photos, topless photos or bikini photos of her.

It is a fact that, in the 5 a.m. hour, 31% of my traffic was from Google freaks searching for Hannah Giles photos. A fact, but not an accident, because I don't believe in accidents. So any liberal scumbag or Perez Hilton celebrity-blogger slimeball who thinks he's going to cash in on Hannah's sudden fame . . .

Dude. Nobody beats the Rule 5 Google-bomb king. Hannah is protected, you see, and certainly not by the Google-bomb alone. Not even a denunciation by notorious God-hater Charles Johnson can harm her.

Considering that I'm sharing very valuable advice with conservative bloggers here, maybe somebody should hit the tip jar. But if you are actually so stupid as to believe I'm going to post Hannah Giles bikini photos . . . hey, you're in luck!

Despite the fact that Hannah is a devout Christian girl the same age as my own daughter, despite the fact that her father, Doug Giles, is a friend of mine and a Christian youth leader -- well-known for his skill with firearms and martial arts -- I am indeed going to post a photo of Hannah in a bikini:

That's Hannah on the left, and there's no need to name the tall blonde on the right. (A good reporter never burns his sources, especially tall blonde sources from Texas.) But if you'll click on the image, it will show the whole photo.

Genius? Maybe, although I'm sometimes kind of sloppy with the HTML code, so e-mail Smitty if you have any problems with that link . . . you sick freaks.

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. . . . Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.
-- Proverbs 31:10, 30 (KJV)

As Doug Giles could certainly tell you, there are lots of people who won't sit still for a sermon, but they love to hear a good joke. Deo Vindice.

Maybe I should denounce David Frum

It might help his traffic:

It's been seven months since Frum parted ways with National Review to launch his own website -- NewMajority.com -- in an effort to rally new voices and cure the Republican Party of its "psychotic episode." It's a long-term project that's fighting against the tide. ...
On a practical level, the Internet is proving to be a little more complicated than Frum first thought it would be, he says. He admits to shortcomings in his Web acumen, and NewMajority.com has already undergone a redesign since it went online.
The site has gotten about 800,000 unique visitors. By comparison, the conservative site Townhall.com receives 2 million unique visitors per month.

Via my favorite Canadian thought-criminal, Kathy Shaidle, who's just renamed her site The Blog That Gets More Visitors Than David Frum.

Despite some of his irritating errors, I still consider David Frum a friend. Whether he considers me a friend . . .

Anyway, Frum's definitely a better writer than Michael "Herewith, A Brief Primer" Gerson. And he's more conservative than David Brooks or Conor Friedersdorf. Of course, I suppose that such statements might be considered damning him with faint praise, but . . .

As the acclaimed blogospheric theorist who authored "How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year" -- and having gotten the second million hits in less than six months -- I suppose that I should offer my friend David Frum some helpful advice:

• Make fun of trashy celebrities.

At an event last night hosted by America's Future Foundation, I found myself talking to an official of the Heritage Foundation (he shall remain nameless) who told me how much he loved my David Copperfield rant.

Well, what does David Copperfield have to do with politics or policy? Nothing, except maybe as a pretty solid argument for tort reform when a show business superstar gets sued after inviting a beauty-pageant contestant to his own private tropical island.

However, my point is, people who don't normally read political news might be interested in what you have to say about "Jon and Kate Plus Eight," Donald Trump or Miley Cyrus. And even people who are interested in political news sometimes get bored with all-politics-all-the-time. So if you can find some pretext to criticize these tabloid-TV people -- "Will ObamaCare Cover Donald Trump's Hair?" -- go for it.

• Game the algorithms.

This goes back to the "Carrie Prejean Nude" thing. A certain level of what I call "residual traffic" -- random Google hits produced by Web-surfers searching for some odd phrase and clicking onto your old posts -- will accumulate over time at any site.

However, the clever blogger can inject steroids into his residual traffic by employing certain words -- "nude" and "naked" and "sex" -- that will reliably draw a certain level of 3 a.m. traffic from perverts.

Some have criticized the ethics of getting traffic that way. Ethics, schmethics. If some pervert overly enthusiastic heterosexual wants to see Carrie Prejean nude -- and I'd say nearly 300,000 visitors here in May constitute reliable evidence that this isn't purely a hypothetical scenario -- why should TMZ and Perez Hilton monopolize that traffic?

Maybe some of those perverts overly enthusiastic heterosexuals actually agree with Carrie Prejean's stance in defense of traditional marriage. They may also approve of her silicon breast implants, which I don't, but it would be un-American to stifle dissent on such important issues.

Also, maybe the computer porn freaks will feel a twinge of conscience after their search for topless jailbait pictures of Carrie Prejean lead them to a conservative site. "Why am I wasting my life wanking to porn," the freak asks himself, "when I could become a right-wing blogger and actually make money from my sick obsessions?"

Whether or not this explains the phenomenon of TrogloPundit, I refuse to speculate. But I figure not all porn freaks are into high taxes and bad foreign policy, so maybe if some conservative bloggers are perverts overly enthusiastic heterosexuals 6-foot-7 Wisconsinians with Megan Fox obsessions . . . well, NTTAWWT. IYKWIMAITYD.

• No blog is an island.

This is what the Rule 2 FMJRA is all about. Unless you're Glenn Reynolds (and maybe even if you are Glenn Reynolds) your blog traffic is dependent in great measure on getting other blogs to link you.

"But wait," you say, "people should be linking me because I'm a genius who is always right about everything."

Good luck with that strategy. It worked so well for David Kuo and Culture 11, after all.

If the only sites you ever link as source material are "legitimate" news sources like the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal, where is the incentive for bloggers to link you? Other than the fact that you are a complete genius, I mean.

Install Site Meter, Technorati and E-Referrer, and pay attention to who's linking you. Try to analyze and develop strategic uses for that data. If I hadn't been checking my Site Meter today, I wouldn't have known I'd been linked by Kathy Shaidle, which inspired this whole freaking rant.
If you don't work to improve what Moe Lane calls blog-fu, your only source of traffic will be (a) the small universe of Republicans so obsessed with politics they'll read anything, and (b) the occasional "pity-lanche."

Everybody visit NewMajority.com. Because David's my friend.

Humor-Impaired Commenter Syndrome

This rare condition can strike without warning:

If you want to know why Erik Erikson was invited to speak and not you, go to Alexa and compare your stats to Redstate. Orders of magnitude, buddy.
Why the difference? Redstate is about issues. This blog is about three things: 1) Who does and doesn't link to you, 2) Your resentment over real and imagined insults, 3) Begging for money in every post.
You want to be a player in conservative circles? Write about something that matters to a national conservative audience. And no, that would not be a two-part, line-by-line dissection of a column written two weeks ago by an unknown kid in a newspaper read only by people who eat whale blubber. Nor would it be a book-length rehashing of your personal disappointments at the Washington Times.
Seriously, this is the fourth time you've posted profoundly juvenile fantasies about hurting Telford because you're not on the program. If you ever do make it, your blurb will say, "We invited Stacy so he would stop whining."
-- "plarson," 7:55 a.m.

Research indicates that anonymity is closely associated with Humor-Impaired Commenter Syndrome, perhaps because people are afraid to advertise -- under their own names -- the fact that they are too stupid or ignorant to get the freaking jokes.

Or that they are too stupid or ignorant to tell the difference between (a) a Republican discussion board about "issues" and (b) the personal blog of a journalist who has been called (by L.J. Miller of Red State, ironically enough) "the conservative Hunter S. Thompson for today."

And speaking of "issues," let's have an informal poll. Please read the following statment aloud:

A major problem of the Republican Party today is that in recent years the GOP has attracted too many humorless self-important blowholes who take everything literally and who only want to talk about "issues."

Do you (a) strongly agree, (b) agree somewhat, (c) disasagree somewhat, (d) disagree strongly, or (e) froth with rage because you're the humorless self-important blowhole "plarson" who is belatedly realizing what a complete fool you have made of of yourself?

Of course, a poll measures what is merely a matter of opinion. As a professional journalist, I am trained to deal strictly with neutral, objective facts.

Important fact: I arrived late to the blogosphere. In 2003, one of my interns at The Washington Times, a promising young feature writer named Amy Doolittle, came to me with the suggestion of writing a story about something called "blogs," a term she had to explain was short for "weblogs."

Miss Doolittle began to explain the concept of these do-it-yourself personal online journals, and my reaction was, "Oh, you mean, like MichelleMalkin.com or The Corner at NRO?"

Yes, kind of like The Corner, answered Miss Doolittle, but she then told me that, although some of these "blog" things were about politics, they could also be about . . . anything, including the personal hobbies and daily activities of the individual bloggers. Some of these sick freaks even blogged about their cats.

This seemed rather an obscure sort of topic for a feature article in America's Newspaper, but young Miss Doolittle had her heart set on it. So we presented the idea to assistant managing editor Maria Stainer who, while perhaps even more mystified than I -- "OK, now, explain to me one more time: Why do we need to do a story about this?" -- nevertheless approved the proposal, rather than to break poor Miss Doolittle's heart.

Fast forward to December 2006: Having survived the final deadline required to complete the manuscript of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party, I'm on the phone with my co-author Lynn Vincent, discussing the promotion and marketing of the book.

"We must have a Donkey Cons blog."
"Well, a Web site, maybe, but why a blog?"
"Because we must. Everybody does blogs to promote their books nowadays."
"Stacy, a blog will eat your life."

Lynn had been assigned blog duties at World magazine, where she was features editor, and thus knew whereof she spoke. Did I heed her warning? Oh, no, no, no.

So at 10:55 a.m. on Friday, January 13, 2006, the Donkey Cons blog made its inauspicious debut. Immediately, I was confronted with a problem: If an author writes in the blogosphere and nobody reads it, why bother blogging at all?

What followed was a crash course in what are known as Traffic Enhancement Strategies, a subject subsequently explained as "How To Get A Million Hits On Your Blog In Less Than A Year."

There are people who make money writing books and teaching seminars about this topic -- including the kind of important people who get invited to RightOnline -- but I am notoriously averse to expert advice and, indeed, have been known to share Hayekian critiques of the entire concept of expertise.

Having never been a big fan of self-help books ("Dr. Phil's Guide to Sexually Abusing Interns"), the last place you'll ever find me is sitting in a hotel conference room listening to some neurasthenic geek drone on about SEOs and Web 2.0 social networking technology.

Sorry, geek-face, I don't roll that way. What I know, I learned by the bootstrap trial-and-error method and, proud though I may be, I am not too proud to occasionally display the scars that are the inevitable result of the "error" part of that process. Mr. "plarson" is invited to read the motto atop this blog:

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."
-- Arthur Koestler

It would be a disservice to my readers if I were less than honest about my own motives. "I Write For Money," as I once explained to that notoriously self-important blowhole Rod Dreher. Tthere is nothing I hate worse than a professional writer who, in a sort of bait-and-switch marketing scheme, endeavors to attract a gullible readership prone to believing that he, the writer, is a disinterested philosophe who has no interest in grubbing for filthy lucre.

This is not a blog for chumps and suckers. If you're too stupid to recognize that "crunchy" conservatism is a crooked game of three-card monte, if you don't get the ongoing schtick when I indulge in self-deprecating mock-Gonzo humor, you are obviously reading the wrong blog.

The correct reader for this blog is a certain mischievous resident of Cincinnati, Ohio, who just hit the tip jar for a full Benjamin, and included this double-dog-dare-ya message: "Roadtrip to PA. GO! Tell MM, Hi from Sharon. She does not know me."

So while I would like to stick around here and expend another 1,500 words explaining exactly what I meant to say when I started this post, there is now no time to waste. Sharon in Cincinnati must have a personally autographed copy of the Best. Book. Evah! and there is only one man in the blogosphere who can get it for her.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro . . . and hit the freaking tip jar. Erik Telford's going to be buying the beer in Pittsburgh tonight, but man does not blog for beer alone.

TWO MILLION VISITORS!

About 3 p.m. today, The Other McCain recorded its 2 millionth visitor. It took slightly more than 11 months to hit the 1-million mark on Feb. 13, and barely five months to knock down the next million.

We must therefore begin by thanking Carrie Prejean nude. Any other famous people who want to take on hot political issues that offend the Left, please do us a favor and e-mail Smitty as soon as you find out TMZ has posted those topless photos taken when you were 20. We need the traffic. (C'mon, don't be so coy, Hillary . . .)

In addition to thanking Googlers of topless celebrity photos and our regular readers -- to the extent that these are not coterminous categories -- Smitty and I are grateful to the numerous bloggers who have linked us. Here are the folks who've thrown us the most traffic, according to E-Referrer.com:

• Instapundit
• Michelle Malkin
• Hot Air
• Conservative Grapevine
• Memeorandum
• Ann Coulter
• Andrew Sullivan
• Protein Wisdom
• Five Feet of Fury
• Ace of Spades HQ
• The American Spectator
• Right Wing News
• RealClearPolitics (Best of the Blogs)
• TigerHawk
• Conservatives for Palin
• Taki's Magazine
• American Power
• Riehl World View
• Jule Crittenden
• Cynthia Yockey, Conservative Lesbian
• The Jawa Report
• The Sundries Shack
• Legal Insurrection
• Clever S. Logan
• Monique Stuart
• Red State
• Twitter
• Cold Fury
• Balloon Juice
• Gateway Pundit
• Iowahawk
• Outside the Beltway
• Patriot Room
• Glenn Greenwald
• VDare.com
• Jammie Wearing Fool
• Ann Althouse
• Mahablog
• IMAO
• Pundit & Pundette
• Paco Enterprises
• Little Miss Attila

Loyal readers, please congratulate yourselves in the comments. You bloggers . . . OK, story time.

It was the last night of CPAC, back in February. As I was circulating around trying to squeeze every last schmooze opportunity out of the event, I came out of the hotel bar and there in the lobby stood Professor Glenn Reynolds and the magnificent Dr. Helen. I'd never met either of them before.

Walked right up, reached out to shake the professor's hand, handed him a business card and, by way of introduction, said, "Hi, I'm Stacy McCain. You haven't been linking me enough lately."

Our slogan: All Your Links Are Belong To Us!

UPDATE: You like me! You really like me! Linked at Memeorandum, and by Jimmie at Sundries Shack, Doug at Daley Gator, Fisherville Mike and Professor Douglas at American Power, who is pounding "controversy" into a coma. (Megaphone voice)

PROFESSOR DOUGLAS, WE KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE!
STEP AWAY FROM THAT PEEPHOLE AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!

(Voice from inside bullet-riddled hideout.)

YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE, COPPER!

Sigh. Remind me to amend No. 5 in The Rules v2.0: "Unless images of the aforesaid hottie shall constitute evidence in a criminal investigation . . ."

UPDATE II: On the other hand, if the Professor is trying to make a point about the sheer insanity of celebrity culture and how it intersects with the voyeuristic impulses rampant in the TMZ/Perez Hilton Epoch, he might have the makings of a Los Angeles Times op-ed essay there.

Look, over the last month, a typical day for American Power -- that is, a day without any especially "hot" new post that spiked up the traffic -- was in the 1,400-1,800 hit range. He's currently knocking down about 500 hits an hour, which should easily put him at 5,000 hits by the end of the day, and that extra 3,000 is almost entirely due to people Googling for the notorious video of a cable-sports reporter almost nobody ever heard of before.

When you get a hot meme, you gotta ride it, like Professor Jacobsen rode DijonGate to SiteMeter glory. The demand calls supply into existence. There is something important in this thing, and if Donald Douglas can distill it into 700 thoughtful words, he might find real value here.

But I still wish more people would follow the upstanding example set by John Hawkins at Conservative Grapevine, and only link classy, tasteful Rule 5 stuff like Miranda Kerr in a Victoria's Secret photoshoot.

Do I have any inkling who Miranda Kerr is? No. But until about a month ago, I'd never heard of Gerald Walpin, Fred Wiedersdorf or Judith Gwynne, either.

How to Get a Million Hits: Menu-ized

Introduction
1. Shameless Blogwhoring
2. The Full Metal Jacket Reach-Around
3. Memeorandum
4. Make Some Enemies
5. Christina Hendricks
Updates & Addendum
(Originally published 2/15/08; this menu-ized version created by Frequent Commenter Smitty.)

Introduction
Having promised an appropriate celebration of passing the 1-million-visitors Site Meter threshold Friday (Feb. 13, 2008), I will do so by sharing the secret of my success. It's the Underpants Gnome Theory of Blogging:

• Phase 1: Get a Blogspot account.
• Phase 2: ?
• Phase 3: One million visitors!

Obviously, the key here is Phase 2, which has been exceptionally disorganized. Some guys work smart. Some guys work hard. Some guys are just incredibly lucky.

The perceptive blog consumer will notice that posts here don't have all those little thingies (Digg, etc.) the way some other blogs do. This is not because I disdain such methods of traffic enhancement, but because I'm such a primitive Unfrozen Caveman Blogger I can't figure that stuff out. It's the same reason I'm still on a Blogspot platform, rather than switching to a custom-designed Wordpress format. Blogspot is so simple that even I can figure it out, and if they'd just offer a few more templates -- hey, guys, how about a template with variable-width sidebars on both sides? -- I might be able to fake that custom-designed elegance, too. I understand basic HTML, but Javascript no can do, and I'm too cheap to shell out the bucks for geek services.

Lacking advanced, sophisticated technological gee-whizzery, I have been forced to employ astonishingly crude Web 0.1 methods of traffic-enhancement, namely:

• Write stuff people might want to read; and
• Compulsively e-mail my posts to bloggers who might possibly consider linking me.

Astonishingly crude, but also surprisingly effective. And so we come to Rule 1, the Prime Directive so to speak:

• 1. Shameless Blogwhoring.

[top]
I'm amazed that Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Ace of Spades and the Hot Air crew haven't declared a fatwa against me for the way I relentlessly fill their inboxes with blogwhoring e-mails like Arnold Horshack trying to get Mr. Kotter's attention: "Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!"

However, the smart newcomer to the 'sphere doesn't just suck up to big-traffic bloggers who can throw him major traffic (although he does that with a single-minded fanaticism), he also sucks up sideways and downward, to bloggers who might not be able to throw 10,000 hits a day, but who are nonetheless valued contributors to the blogging community.

Little Miss Attila is my favorite example of the "valued contributors" category. Her best recent month was 24K visits in October, but she's been around the 'sphere a long time, is much beloved, and it is bad kharma not to link her. Every so often, while on the hunt for good stuff to blog about, I'll go over to LMA, find something good she's blogging about and link it. Why? Because, among various non-kharmic reasons, she has done the same for me, which brings me to Rule 2:

• 2. The Full Metal Jacket Reach-Around

[top]
Maybe you're not a fan of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, and I'm not saying you should be. But the psychotic drill sergeant gives a notorious rant in which he colorfully expresses an important life principle: When someone does you a favor, find an opportunity to return the kindness.

Reciprocal linkage is the essential lubricant that makes the blogosphere purr with contentment. If somebody's throwing you traffic, you should either (a) give them a link-back update, or at a minimum (b) keep them in mind for future linkage. Because you don't want to end up on the wrong end of a kharmic unbalance in the 'sphere, where you're always taking and never giving.

Every beginning blogger confronts the Zero Hour. You've been blogging steadily for a week or two, sending around e-mails, trackbacking where you can, trying to develop some kind of regular traffic. And then, late one night, you think you might have finally composed your first Instalanche-worthy post and you e-mail it to Glenn Reynolds. You go to bed like a 7-year-old kid on Christmas Eve, then wake up at 4 a.m. and check your Site Meter to discover that your latest hourly traffic is . . . ZERO.

At which point, you want to swallow a handful of sedatives, wash it down with a quart of bleach, slit your wrists and stick your head in the oven. You are a complete and utter failure.

I've never forgotten the Zero Hour, and if I've become slightly less conscientious about reciprocal linkage since then, God forgive me, but I do try. In the midst of a traffic upswing, not all linkage is noticeable on Site Meter, so I check Technorati, which shows linkage regardless of traffic level. And thank you Dad29, thank you Joe Kristan, thank you, Andrea Shea King, thank you Jimmie Bise, thank you William Teach. Damn my lazy thoughtlessness, but please don't doubt my gratitude.

Now that we've scratched the surface of technique, let's address the tricky little subject of content with Rule 3:

• 3. Memeorandum

[top]
Did somebody say "lazy thoughtlessness"? The easiest place to find blog fodder is Memeorandum, which has an algorithmic formula that automatically updates to tell you what the hot topics are in the 'sphere.

I especially like their "Featured Posts," sort of a random grab-bag of stuff that will occasionally feature some lefty shooting off his mouth in pure idiotic moonbat mode. Grab that sucker by the neck and give him the Mother Of All Fiskings, with enough vitriolic ad hominem to make sure he never forgets it. Because buddy, the lefties will turn right around and do it to you if you ever rate "Featured Post" status, and there's nothing like a vicious flame war to earn your spurs in the 'sphere. Which brings me to Rule 4:

• 4. Make Some Enemies

[top]
We'll have none of your "bipartian civility" around here, you sissy weaklings. This here is the Intertoobs, and we're As Nasty As We Wanna Be. The fact that The Moderate Voice has turned into a reliable vessel for DNC talking points should tell you all you need to know about the fate of bipartisanship in the blogosphere.

At the same time, however, don't confuse cyber-venom with real-world hate. Maybe Ace of Spades really would like to go upside Andrew Sullivan's head with a baseball bat, I don't know. But at some point you understand it's just blogging about politics, and you start wondering if maybe it shares a certain spectator-friendly quality with pro wrestling. For all we know, Ace is spending weekends at Sully's beach shack in Provincetown. (Next on Blogging Heads TV: Can "Bears" and Ewoks Be "Just Friends"?)

Some readers might remember when I first kicked Conor Friedersdorf in the knee for "insufficient cynicism." Conor is, in real life, a nice guy. But he's also (a) young, and (b) as earnest as John Boy Walton. So I got into a habit, when he was at Culture11, of kicking him in the knee with some regularity. It's the Fraternity Initiation Principle: Pledges must be abused by their elders, and learn to be properly respectful, or else one day the ambitious little monsters will strangle us in our sleep. (Cf., my suggestion that George Freaking Will should be air-dropped on Jalalabad from a C-130.)

A couple days ago, hunting around for a reason to link my friend Russ Smith's SpliceToday, I happened upon a column by Russ's young minion, Andrew Sargus Klein, offering a particularly insipid argument for federal arts funding. Now, having been born and raised a Democrat, and arguably having never outgrown my obnoxious youthful arrogance, I can actually relate to Klein's insipid argument. Stupid is as stupid does, and when I was 25, I might well have written something equally stupid. But the boy will never outgrow his stupidity unless he gets whomped on the head some.

Easy as it would have been to ignore Klein, I hit upon the delightfully fun idea of laying into him in Arkansas knife-fight mode: If you're going to cut a man, eviscerate him. So I quickly composed a hyperbolic ad hominem rant, with the thoughtfully civil title, "Andrew Sargus Klein is an arrogant elitist douchebag." I forward-dated the post for Friday morning, and sent Russ an e-mail to the effect of, "Hey, hope you don't mind me abusing your office help a little bit. Nothing like a flame-war to build traffic. Don't let on to Klein that I'm just funnin' around with him."

I'd hoped to bait Klein himself into a response. However, before that could happen -- as if intent on illustrating how to make a fool out of yourself by taking this stuff too seriously -- one of Klein's friends offered up a comment:

Andrew Klein may be arrogant and elitist but he could craft logical arguments around your bumbling hypocrisy all day and night.

Of course I never bother "craft[ing] logical arguments," sweetheart. It's a freaking blog. If you want logic, subscribe to a magazine or buy a book. Pardon my double-entendre, Lola Wakefield, but people come here for the cheesecake. Logical arguments are a dime a dozen on the Internet, but sexy hotness . . . well, that reminds me of Rule 5:

• 5. Christina Hendricks

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Or Anne Hathaway or Natalie Portman or Sarah Palin bikini pics. Rule 5 actually combines four separate principles of blogospheric success:

• A. Everybody loves a pretty girl -- It's not just guys who enjoy staring at pictures of hotties. If you've ever picked up Cosmo or Glamour, you realize that chicks enjoy looking at pretty girls, too. (NTTAWWT.) Maybe it's the vicious catty she-thinks-she's-all-that factor, or the schadenfreude of watching a human trainwreck like Britney Spears, but no one can argue that celebrity babes generate traffic. Over at Conservative Grapevine, the most popular links are always the bikini pictures. And try as I might to make "logical arguments" for tax cuts, wouldn't you rather watch Michelle Lee Muccio make those arguments?
• B. Mind the MEGO factor -- All politics all the time gets boring after a while. Observant readers will notice that the headlines at Hot Air often feature silly celebrity tabloid stuff and News Of The Weird. Even a stone political junkie cannot subsist on a 24/7 diet of politics. The occasional joke, the occasional hot babe, the occasional joke about a hot babe -- it's a safety valve to make sure we don't become humorless right-wing clones of those Democratic Underground moonbats.
• C. Sex sells -- Back when I was blogging to promote Donkey Cons (BUY TWO!), I accidentally discovered something via SiteMeter: Because the subtitle of the book is "Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party," we were getting traffic from people Googling "donkey+sex." You'd be surprised at the keyword combinations that bring traffic to a political blogger who understands this. Human nature being what it is, the lowest common denominator is always there, even if it's sublimated or reverse-projected as puritanical indignation, which brings us to . . .
• D. Feminism sucks -- You can never go wrong in the blogosphere by having a laugh at the expense of feminists. All sane people hate feminism, and no one hates feminism more than smart, successful, independent women who've made it on their own without all that idiotic "Sisterhood Is Powerful" groupthink crap. And if you are one of those fanatical weirdos who takes that Women's Studies stuff so seriously that you're offended by Stephen Green's sexist objectification of Christina Hendricks and her mighty bosom -- well, sweetheart, to paraphrase Rhett Butler: "You should be offended, and often, and by someone who knows how."

So, there you have it: Five Rules For Getting a Million Hits On Your Blog. There are probably another two dozen rules, but I'm too lazy to think of what they are right now. And to be honest, if it weren't for that old picture of me in a Speedo, I'd probably still be 20,000 hits shy of the million mark. Some of us are just . . . blessed with exceptional modesty. And some guys get the steak knives.

Updates:
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Probably special mention should be made of Kathy "Five Feet of Fury" Shaidle, who never heard of a fair fight. She's one of those people you don't want angry at you. A ninja blackbelt in Rule 4, when she goes at an antagonist, it's a knee in your groin and an elbow in your eye. However, she also keeps the customers satisfied with some naughty pinup hotness. (Rule 5!) That rare creature: A Canadian we like.

UPDATE II: Linked at Conservative Grapevine.

ADDENDUM 3/22: Maybe Rule 6 should be: "Get a cool co-blogger like Frequent Commenter Smitty," who created this menu-ized version of the The Rules (originally published 2/15/09).

I would also advise newbies to contemplate "The Parable of the Doubting Padwan of Fu." This is a reference to blog-fu, a term I first saw employed by Moe Lane to describe superior blogging ability. If you are someone who is new to the blogosphere, it is important to strive to emulate the acknowledged masters of blog-fu, people who started blogging waaaaay back when.

UPDATE 3/23: Linked by VodkaPundit, acknowledged master of drunkblogging.

Also see: Blog habits and the need for speed.