Blog Your Way to Success With Hairy Legs

I’ve been blogging for about a year now and am finally discovering the secret to building an audience: hairy legs, lots and lots of hairy legs.

Desert Tarantula

My brief and rather flippant discussion of the desert tarantula from last April is my most popular post ever.  It does have a passing reference to tarantula sex.  Yet as intriguing and weird as that sounds, the word “tarantula” itself is what brings in the crowds.

Now that I’ve discovered this sexless secret, I’m offering it free of charge to my readers.  As a bonus, I’m also including (free of charge) some tips on how to wander the tarantula trail to blogging success.

A post on tarantulas doesn’t have to be great; mine wasn’t.  It doesn’t even have to be about tarantulas.

I wouldn’t encourage spam like this: “Here’s a link to a very interesting post on levitra in tarantulas. I learned a lot. Have a nice day on tarantula viagra.”  That’s a real turn-off to everyone, especially arachnophobes.

No, what I’m suggesting are topics like these:

• Eight Ways to Combat Your Phobias
• The Tao of the Tarantula
• Urticating Hairs: A New Paradigm for Social Media
• Put Fangs in Your Fiction
• Eight Reasons to Stop Shaving Your Legs (or chest, or….well, you get the idea)

Once bitten by these kinds of metaphors, you’ll find it easy to spin more.  Like baby tarantulas, your ideas will keep on hatching, spreading, and luring more prey.

If you actually want to write about tarantulas, you could address the concerns that spur people on desperate – and often unfulfilled — Google Quests.  For instance, many arrive at my blog seeking answers to some variation on this dilemma: “my tarantula has burrowed and won’t come out.”  Imagine scores of people out there, some of them children, wringing their hands and crying over their pouting pet tarantulas. You could build an empire explaining how to tell the difference between natural instinct, illness, and bad moods in theraphosids.

Even though I’m an arachnophobe, I’m considering expanding my blog in the coming year by using all of the above options (except, of course spamming.  I’d never do that).  I invite you to do the same.

May you all achieve success in blogging, critter-finding (or whatever endeavors tickle your fancy) in the new year.

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To learn more about how humor helps me get through the darkness of winter and the commercialization of the holidays, see this and this.

To read a more thoughtful (but also humorous) essay on my troubled relationship with spiders, especially hairy ones, check out “A Nature Lover’s Phobia” published in Fringe Magazine.

If you’re not into tarantulas, you might enjoy some other popular posts from the past year, all of them from my “Species of the Week” series:

• California Condors
• Great Horned Owls
• Pacific Tree Frog