Ryan the name dropper

I figured something out yesterday: When you write blog entries about people like Mark Cuban, it attracts traffic to your blog, especially if you actually say something relevant about the person instead of just typing their name(s) for no reason other than to fool people (kind of like what I'm doing here).

At this point in time, neither Aimless nor the Aimless blog holds a very high page rank with the search engines, so a Google search for "Mark Cuban" will not easily bring anyone to Aimless. However, as I noticed yesterday when I checked my stats, if someone searches for "Mark Cuban" on something like icerocket.com shortly after I have posted an entry about Mark Cuban, my blog entry will be one of the first matches. But as more people write about Mark Cuban, my entry will creep further down the list.

Let's give it a try: IceRocket search results for "Mark Cuban" and Technorati search results for "Mark Cuban."

Now, if you are reading this shortly after I've posted it, this blog entry should be one of the first matches. If you're reading this in 2007, this page certainly will not be a match.

I haven't given this a lot of thought yet, but I think someone like me could effectively attract a lot of new blog traffic by writing about people who are well-known but not red-hot famous. The problem with red-hot famous is that everyone else is writing about those people, too. So if I decided to write about someone like Hugo Chavez on a day like today, people searching for "Hugo Chavez" will have to dig pretty deep to find my blog entry.

So who should I start talking about? Jon Stewart maybe? Barbara Ehrenreich? Michael Moore? George Carlin? Kevin Smith? Brett Favre? Troy Smith? Michael Jordan? Ron Jeremy? Traci Lords? Any suggestions? Most of these names would be reasonably effective, at least today, because these people are not hogging the headlines. Tomorrow afternoon, however, Troy Smith might pass for 500 yards versus Penn State. If so, all the college football bloggers will be talking about it, which will push this page way back in the search results.

If you found this page by searching for one of the names I've dropped, tell me why you are thinking about that person. Give me something to think about; something to write about.