“…what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” – Lewis Carroll
Regular readers may have guessed by now that I have a lot of trouble playing by other people’s rules if I can see no rational basis for them. If a rule makes sense to me, and I can easily internalize it, then well and fine; but a good way to get me to take my ball and go home is to come out with a bunch of arbitrary crap that goes against my grain. As soon as I hear “you must” or “it is imperative that” or “because I’m the mommy, that’s why,” I tune out and go my own way. So when I started blogging and some well-meaning friends and acquaintances told me that I needed to do “search engine optimization” and word my posts such-and-such way for the search engines to pick me up and all that hoo-ha, I said “thanks, but no thanks” and did it the way which seemed right to me: that is, to invest my time and energy in making a good site with interesting, varied posts which was fun to look at and easy to navigate. A few months later, once I started appearing on a lot of sex-worker-advocacy radar units, I had some other (again, well-meaning) people tell me that I was going about it the wrong way, and that if I was going to be a sex worker advocate I needed to look and act and sound like everybody else. To them also, I said “no, thanks”. Every once in a while I still get suggestions like that; if I think they’re good I act on them (my “Offsite” page, Subject Index and participation in Twitter were all suggestions), but if they want to change the basic way I do things (like the casual reader who called the fictional interludes “distracting”) I politely thank the person and then ignore them.
Well, my instincts were good; by spending my time generating quality content rather than worrying about how people would find it, and by following my gut about what to write about and how to write it, I’ve managed to create a fairly popular blog here. But though most of my visitors arrive via link or referral or content search, a very large number get here in a way I never anticipated: image searches. I’ve written before about how I came to start The Honest Courtesan; the nutshell version is that regular reader The Human Scorch pointed me to WordPress when I complimented him on his blog’s appearance. So after I chose my theme and got my first page up, I asked his opinion; it can be summed up in two words: “widgets” and “pictures”. So, I played around with the widgets and went searching for a few pictures which I thought would enhance my first post. I still tweak the widgets occasionally (you’ve probably noticed the new Twitter feed by now), but it was in the pictures that I went really all-out. I quickly discovered that good pictures can add a lot to a column; oh, sometimes they’re just decorations which do little more than make the posts easier to read by breaking up a wall of text, but other times they drive home points, add humor or actually provide additional data. I couldn’t have imagined they would actually bring in an appreciable number of visitors, though.
Boy, was I ever wrong; as I explained in “Top Ten”, my three most-visited columns (and four more in that original “top ten” list) earned those positions almost entirely via image searches. My most popular column to date was the one published one year ago today, “Coming and Going”; it was viewed 6353 times last year, and 5628 of those times were from searches which homed in on a map of Texas counties I used to illustrate an estimate of the total amount of money wasted by locking up hookers in all the counties in Texas combined. Image searches for Veronica Franco, Pompeii, Mira Sorvino, “Mardi Gras tits”, Phryne, the fictional planet Gor and even sofa beds brought in lots of traffic by the time I wrote “Top Ten”, and in the last six months “broken condom”, “hells angels”, “grimoire”, “Capri Anderson” and “ground hog” each brought in hundreds of hits. I even get respectable traffic from “Maggie McNeill nude”; seeing that one in the search list never fails to make me smile.
Performing an image search for any of these terms (except the last one, naturally) will deliver oodles of results; why, then, do so many searchers end up here? I think it’s because I choose my pictures in the same way I write the columns in which they’re embedded: carefully and according to my own standards and sense of aesthetics. Sometimes it takes me as long to illustrate a column as it does to write it (especially when there are more than the usual two or three pictures), and if I can’t find what I’m looking for I often reread the text for a different idea to illustrate and start all over again. Readers often compliment the picture choices, and I suspect that the images I select so carefully stand out among dozens of others, thereby drawing the searcher to this blog…where at least some of them, I hope, find more to hold their attention than just pretty pictures.
I didn’t find this site through pictures – I found it through …
“The OTHER … ‘The Honest Courtesan'”
There are two of you on the net – at least.
The other is (was) Melissa Mariposa – who also has a blog titled “The Honest Courtesan”. I just checked it though, and although she has a post on it from December 11th of last year – the background and formatting is gone – so it’s either a problem with my TV set, or her host, or the blog is dying off. Melissa is a currently practicing escort in Tennessee (I think) – but that wasn’t her business website – it was a site where she posted her personal thoughts on things.
Anyway – she has a fairly interesting blog too – and I don’t know how I came across it – but I did find it once. Later on, I tried to “re-find” it using google and the search term “The Honest Courtesan” – and that’s when I got your blog!
When I came across your blog I said to myself … “I don’t know who this is! This isn’t what I’m looking for!” But I did read a few lines of what you’d written that day, and that led to reading the whole column – and that led to my current “Maggie Addiction”. 😛
Ummm, the Red Umbrella – always HOT. Have you ever posted the “history” on that picture and how it came to be made?
Oh, that’s simple; I just wanted a picture for my first December 17th column, so we took advantage of an unusually warm day (December 11th, 2010) to snap a couple of dozen pictures before I got too cold to continue. That was the best one, but one of my dogs ran behind me at the moment it was taken so a friend of mine had to digitally remove her!
It can only help the normalization of sex workers when they are allowed to express their individuality. Obviously they vary in personality, physique, nationality, education, socio-economic background, religious and political views, so why pretend everyone is the same?
Some will treat themselves (like spending thousands of euros on a dress), while others share their specialized knowledge, such as the Post Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP), which is well appreciated.
One of the positive effects of prostitution being accepted rather than just tolerated, is that Lucía-the-prostitute becomes just Lucía, the person.
I have no idea how I came to be here. I do know that it wasn’t a search, image or otherwise. I suppose it was a link from some blog or another, probably The Agitator. Besides your blog only Pete’s Drug WarRant keeps me coming back with equal zeal on such a regular basis.
Once here I liked the table setting and the cook enough to stick around and see what would be served up next time. Might not agree with all the ingredients all the time but the meal itself never fails to satisfy.
Hrm … I think I’m hungry?
I find it funny how you can pay marketing gurus and advertising experts buckets of cash but word of mouth or references can still be the best advertisement one can get. And you only get that if you’re doing something really well. (or really badly, I suppose.)
I’m always glad to see you at the table. Maria. 😉
I found this blog one day while I was reading some threads on ECCIE. I checked out the referenced post and found it rather interesting. I figured I might as well go back to the beginning of the blog and start from there. Several months later and I’ve finally caught up with present posts. Not only Maggie’s columns but also the commentary from readers keeps me coming back for more.
This blog has been very informative and helps to keep things in perspective when encountering the various trafficking stories in the news.
I found this blog purely by chance. I was trying to find the second half of one of CNN’s specials, titled ‘Selling the Girl Next Door’. Suffice to say, I soon forgot about trying to find the special. I think finding this blog has been much more enlightening and educational than that show could ever hope to be.
I must have found this blog through Violet Blue – someone like that. It might have been through a picture, though: I find a lot of interesting stuff when googling for pictures. I’m glad I found this one, though, however it was.
But Oh, you terrible tease! You say there was a picture of one of your dogs in the background of the red umbrella shot: and you had someone edit it out! Terrible, terrible.
There must be pictures of the dogs elsewhere in the blog, hmmm?
found he sight just surfing for sex positive bloggers. Always like the pics you post. And always love the red umbrella shot! Thanks
Thank you so much for the compliments, gentlemen; comments like yours all let me know I’m doing something right! 🙂
Stephen, I don’t think I have any pictures of my dogs here yet, but I’ll see if I can’t find an excuse for one sometime soon! 😉
I knew Maggie online before she started the blog. She let me know what she was up to, and that was too intriguing not to look into, so I did. Been here ever since.