The recent Silence The Rooster ad campaign to promote the popular sleep aid, AmbienCR, has proved to be a wild success—not necessarily for the company selling the drug—but for completely unrelated humor-oriented blogs such as the one you are reading right now.

See, bloggers, such as myself, will latch on to nearly anything that might bring extra exposure without actually having to do any real work. Because, let’s face it, writing interesting content is hard. So, when a dim-witted ad campaign comes along featuring an obnoxious rooster, I’m all over it.

To give you an idea of how effective this “easy exposure” technique can be, let me show you the noticeable jump in traffic I received after writing a simple related article:

DeadRooster.com’s average daily traffic before ad campaign: 1

DeadRooster.com’s average daily traffic after ad campaign: 265,789

Ha! OK, I was only kidding. Dead Rooster’s average daily traffic before the ad campaign was around 1,000 visitors per day and after taking advantage of the Silence The Rooster ad running on TV’s across America (The ad does not run outside the US), I’ve pulled in about 5,500 extra visitors per day for the past three days. That’s more than a 600% increase!

Of course, after the ad stops running and people lose interest, I will once again be forced to write something interesting in order to inspire traffic; a welcome concept, I’m sure, to my regular readers.

So, this will be the last crappy post for a while—from now on, it’s back to the chain-fighting Elvis impersonators and cream-corn-filled llamas you’ve come to expect here at Dead Rooster.

Note: After I get back into the humor grove for a while, and you’ve forgiven me for pimping my blog out to the easy search-engine keyword grab, I will explain how I was able to steal the top spot on the front page of several search engines for the most popular key phrase at the time. It was pure genius. LOL

By the way, I know it’s Silence “Your” Rooster and not Silence “The” Rooster, but there’s a lot of traffic I’m missing out on…

When they get no response, they start sending them to me.

Three or four times a month I get emails from new bloggers asking me the best way to start getting blog traffic. I usually give them the standard methods I used to get Dead Rooster off the ground: sign up for social blogging networks like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog; get an entrecard; submit your site to several blog indexes such as blogflux, topblogging, etc., or, if you are a humor oriented blog, humor-blogs is an absolute must; and, of course, digg, reddit, stumbleupon, etc. But, there’s one special method that I have never revealed to anyone until now.

If this is your first visit to my blog, the very fact that you are reading this right now is probably due in some part to this insidious recipe. In the limited, extremely non-scientific tests I have conducted, it delivers anywhere from five to thirty-five times the normal blog traffic.

So, what’s this cruel active ingredient?

It was revealed to me one magical night in Las Vegas by the hottest blonde I have ever laid eyes on; she was sleek and sexy and when she walked into the casino all the slot-machines began paying off. Stunning though she was, I was able to remain steady and suppress the urge to blurt out something clever. But then she sat down next to me at the bar, ordered something called a “Throbbing Rooster” and the screen on my iPhone shattered.

She turned to me and smiled.

After a bit of small talk she boldly asked me if I was up for something kinky. I said, “Sure, anything, just as long as it doesn’t involve animals or electricity…”

I was surprised to see she was genuinely disappointed by my response. She explained it was unfortunate I felt that way, and that she merely wanted to show me how her hamster wheel generated enough energy to power her toaster. “We could’ve made perfect toast,” she said as she got up to leave, then she further crushed my spirits by adding, “toast that could later be used for making love.”

BOING! Haha! Alright, I admit it: none of that ever happened. But, don’t think I would’ve let you off the hook so quickly if I could’ve come up with a believable—but not too repulsive—way toast could be used during sex. But, the point of this article isn’t to tempt you with hamster wheels and toast; it’s to reveal some rather diabolical ways to get some extra traffic to your blog. Here are five methods. Warning: the first is kind of evil:

1. Use a photo of a hot babe for your avatar on social sites—possibly a hot blonde. This is the easiest, yet “cruelest” method because, even if you are an old, fat, bald guy named Frank who often surfs the net while wearing nothing but a urine-soaked adult diaper, you will still get tons of pulsating young gentlemen clicking thru to see your blog. Although I don’t utilize this idea myself, I know it works because—and I admit this only in the name of science—I have personally been tricked by this method over one million times.

2. Write a ten-word compelling title for your blog post. Why ten words? Because Google considers the first ten words of your post-title when indexing your article. If you use less than ten you could be short-changing yourself and if you use more than ten you are not getting index credit for all your keywords. Of course, sometimes you will have to go with eight or nine words for your title to make sense, but you should always try to get as close to ten as you can while trying not to go over. (Note: this does not mean you should pad it with a bunch of non-keyword-style adjectives just to try and stretch it out! If you can’t fit some kind of substantial keyword in there then don’t worry about it.)

More importantly—and I sometimes wonder what is wrong with some bloggers—make sure you construct a title that sounds interesting enough for someone to want to click and visit your site! If I would have used, “How to get extra blog traffic” as the title of this post, I probably would have still got some okay traffic, but I GUARANTEE it would not have been half as much as I’m getting with the current title. So, why not take a few extra minutes and come up with something tempting?

3. Occasionally write long posts of between 600 and 900 words. This helps by the simple fact that, if there are more words, there will be a better chance something in your article will match something that someone typed into a search engine. It’s a simple matter of statistics: more words, more chances. (note: this post tops-out at over 1,100 words which is way too long).

4. Encourage comments on your blog posts. Most bloggers already do this, but some don’t, and they are shooting themselves in the foot. I get search engine traffic all the time from keywords found only in comments left by others.

5. My final word of advice is to help your fellow bloggers. I have met a bunch of great people online that author some great blogs and I try to submit and promote their posts as much as I can. In turn, they do the same for me. For the most part, we don’t even have to ask each other, we just do it. And, believe me, it feels like a special gift every time your hit-counter explodes 1,000 points in a matter of two minutes because someone was nice enough to submit your post to Stumbleupon, Digg, or Reddit. I’m sure you can think of a fellow blogger that needs a traffic boost—why not surprise them with the gift of traffic? (If you know of no one, you could always surprise me—I won’t mind. Hehe!).

So, there you have it. I admit I was, at first, a bit tricky with this blog post, but I haven’t written anything really good lately and my traffic has been suffering, so I thought I’d give my blog a little boost.

Thanks for stopping by!

Search engine optimization can be an obsession for many bloggers. After all, if no one can find your blog, no one will visit your site. But, for this blog, I decided right from the beginning that I would have fun, write articles, and put ZERO effort into search engine optimization. If no one shows up, so be it. If I end up wasting a little bit of my time, big deal, at least I’m not out doing something truly evil like starting a cult or voting republican.

Today marks 31 days since Dead Rooster first went live on January, 1^st 2008. According to Statcounter, my first month brought me 676 unique visitors and over 1,000 pageloads:

Of course 265 of those unique visitors came within about a 30-minute time span directly after a nice visitor submitted one of my articles to StumbleUpon (thanks for that!).

What I really love about Statcounter though is that it logs search engine keywords and key-phrases used to find your site.

Most of them seem to make sense, but a few are downright hilarious. Here are what I consider the five funniest:

Michelangelo Pull My Finger. This one came in just last night edging out my previous pick, “Annoying Burnt Toast Song.” The amazing thing is that is it was quickly followed by a similar search by another visitor, “The Creation of Adam Pull My Finger.”

How to Get Rid of Roosters. This was the first search phrase ever used to find this site. At the time, I only had one post entitled Dead Rooster Takes Flight. I was absolutely amazed that my blog was already indexed in a search engine. I’m sure the guy thought he hit the jackpot when he saw DeadRooster.com only to be severely disappointed when he read it.

Legally Sane. It doesn’t surprise me to see this since the description of this blog reads, “Legally-Sane Blogging” but it made me laugh anyway.

Bad Grammar Hurdle. Too bad they didn’t type “Grammar Scumbag” since that would have been a lot funnier and it currently puts Dead Rooster at the top of the first search page.

The Human Furball. I’m not sure I want to know what this person is looking for.

Well, thanks to everyone that visited my blog this month. I sure had fun writing it and hope you enjoyed reading it.

Photo credit: Foam