Animal Groping in Iceland

I think I'm going to regularly bring attention to particularly interesting or bizarre stories I come across.  This one definitely counts as bizarre.  Or twisted.

Comments

[Bruce Alexander]

OK, I concede. You have won me over. Where do you find these stories? I have a question: how do people you don't know, know you have a blog?

[Al]

I can't tell you where I'm going to be finding stories or you'll have no reason to come here. As for people I don't know finding the blog, there's the rub. That is what I am working on now, and with the millions of blogs out there, some are never found. I read that 75,000 new blogs appear a day. You put your blog in blog directories. You get yourself in Google. And what I'm working on at the moment, you find other blogs that appeal to you and thus whose readers may like your blog, and you leave comments on their blogs in the hope that they'll be tempted to check out yours. But not just crappy one-line comments and your address, which is basically spamming. Decent useful comments that continue whatever discussion is going on in those comments, or at least amuse people enough to want to find out more about you. This is the big challenge at the moment. If it works you eventually get a critical mass regularly visiting and commenting and linking to you from their blogs, etc. and then you grow quite big. Your friends alone usually won't end up being much use. Those people who spend some time reading blogs each day are the ones you need, and they are a particular breed. The 15 friends you get to come see it for the first few days will not bring in the numbers you might want...many of them don't read blogs, to which you certainly can attest, never having seen a blog until the day before yesterday. But don't let that stop any blog-reading friends I have from forwarding mine on to all and sundry. There, that's your long-winded but pleasantly detailed response to how to get readers.