This is generally a quiet little blog. Not much happens around here. We haven’t been going crazy trying to broaden our visibility, we haven’t been spamming it down the throats of people, and we haven’t, thank fucking God, tweeted one word of it.

That’s probably because we don’t have a tweetdeck. Twitter sucks.

So much for viral marketing 101. We fail. But not in a “fail whale” kind of way. Maybe I’m feeling out of touch with the new media, since this week has seen our li’l ol’ bicycle company besieged with cold calls from entities such as an “entrepreneurial software service company focused on unleashing the talents of our people and providing breakthrough productivity increasing services to companies and organizations across the world.” What does that mean? Seems a bit out of step with what we do here. Which is, in case anyone was wondering, the building and selling of nice, albeit kinda expensive mountain bikes. Not exactly a gigantic viral footprint to fill, but then again I might be provincial in my thinking. Still, a little bit of traffic is a good thing. And in light of that, every once in a while, I sniff around and see what kind of search engine terms have been leading people to this here blog. And, given how this is mostly a Santa Cruz bike focused thing, it’s pretty strange to see what comes up as a common search term leading people to this place:

Almost every day, some variation of “pounds of weed” shows up.

And almost every day, there’s something associated with “scrotum,” go figure.

“Tonic supernaut” shows up almost every day.

As does some reference to either “the guy who beat Rocky Balboa” or “Clubber Lang.”

And disturbingly, every once in a while, the phrase “donkey show.”

And almost every damn day, some kind of reference to tattoos. Probably from the same post as the donkey show…

The above-linked posts reflect how someone might have ended up here, but damned if I know where they ended up clicking the button to get to our blog. Type any one of those phrases into Google all by itself and this blog doesn’t bubble to the surface anytime early at all… But it got me to thinking. Aside from the usual “tallboy” and “roskopp” and “john heyliger” searches, if we pepper our tags with some phrases that are either more spicy, more prevalent, or more related to current events, we just might hook some stragglers. Talk about a viral marketing brainsurge! Heck, we might even get DOZENS more hits a day. Who needs social media monitoring when we’re chumming the waters with this kind of bait? I have to say, after taking a look at what the big horsepower internet searches are for the afternoon of Friday, November 13, 2009, bikes sure do seem kind of quaint and ordinary. Miss America sex tapes? Pedophile preachers? Psychotic chimpanzees? Even if we put Roskopp on a Tonic Supernaut pulling a trailer made out of scrotums piled up with 400 pounds of weed and pointed him toward a donkey show while the theme for Rocky 3 was playing, and posted that up every single damn day, I don’t think we’d get the kind of traction that would slingshot us into the top of Google’s analytics.

I need a beer. Have a great weekend, all…