XXX - Read me!

Pornographers have dreams too.

That’s the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that so many pornographers visit my blog sites.

They’re reading my blogs about dreams; learning dreams’ language of metaphor and self-reflection.  They contemplate my advice and apply it when establishing loving relationships; I help them find common ground in the workplace…

Yeah, I don’t think that’s it.

But there they are!  Month after month.  How do these sleaze balls find me?  Why do they keep coming back?  What words do I use that would trigger a porn site’s browser? 

I haven’t said “titillating” in forever.  And let’s be honest, those guys aren’t into teasing.  They aren’t coy.  Subtlety is not their domain.

Of course dreams are not subtle either.  They expose the truth.  Hey…  Maybe that’s it!  “Exposure.”
Ugh.

And besides, in dreams, exposure is a concept, not a brick in the face, so to speak.  Or a close-up of any other kind.

Double ugh.

I’m told if a person is trying to boost her readership online, she needs to analyze the data.  I’m trying, but my delicate constitution demurs.

All right, here goes:  I have said “hot,” and “mother,” but never in the same sentence and only in response to a dream submitted by a frantic guy who dreamed he left his wife in the desert and danced away with his mom.

OK.  I made that up.  Just now, not in the dream column.  I did it here for you.  To make a point.

Google AdSense reports to me with daily updates about my legions of readers.  They track “hits” on my pages and categorize them for my edification.

And I went to school and everything, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what it means or how to make use of it.

For example, here’s another puzzle:  The Czech Republic reads me.  Romania.  Sweden and Poland account for more than 10,000 hits! 

Indians, Indonesians, Portuguese, Germans.

I’ve always loved the Kazakhstanis.  It must come through in my writing.

I get a bunch of readers in Russia.  Now I do have a couple of friends in Russia, but not 637.  Maybe word of mouth? 

Maybe I’m a phenomenon in Leningrad!?  A superstar in the Ukraine.  They can’t wait for my 2014 “Dreams around the World” tour. 

I could be a regular Rodriguez…you know, that guy in Detroit living in obscure poverty while the albums he made as a young man unbeknownst to him sold millions and millions in South Africa. 

That could be me – wildly popular and praised in Eastern Europe for my poetic voice, my facility with language, my depth of insight into the human heart.  And here am I, plodding along in ignorance, in my perfectly humble way.  Of course.

A couple of months ago I had a big surge in readership.  More than 3500 hits on this column alone. 
I can tell you which browsers routed the greatest number of readers to me.  I can tell you the time of day they read and the posts they liked the best.  I just can’t tell you what I did that month that was different from any other month.

I was my normal charming self.  Witty.  Relatable.  Wise.

Supposedly, I can learn from all these numbers and double my money!  Why, if I can get a handle on this stuff, I might be able to boost my writer’s income into the double digits!

My creeping fear is that all this AdSense rigmarole means nothing. 

That’s probably it.  My readers aren’t what they seem to be.  They’re probably not readers at all, but machines combing the clouds, randomly hitting my websites knowing that I will see their links in AdSense and click on them, thereby giving them another hit so their sponsoring porno kingpins will pay them more. 

Hooray.  Always happy to be helpful.

I have to face the probability that my while the search engines may love me, it’s likely four of my friends in California and six of my cousins in Oklahoma who constitute living breathing human beings reading those blogs.  God love ‘em.


And you!  Of course you, Dear Reader.  You’re the best by the way.  Thanks.