I’ve been maintaining this blog for a year now.  Sometimes it seems much longer, sometimes it seems less, but the reality is that it’s been a year since my first entry (even though I deleted my first entry..) and I’ve been able to manage at least a post or two a month since then.  Sometimes more, sometimes less, but it’s been one of the ways that I’ve kept writing, and I think that writing is a very important part of who I have become.

In that first month, I had only a few page visits per day, most of which were probably me.

In the months that followed, my readership has gone up dramatically, which I’m not entirely certain how to process.  I’m getting thousands of hits per week now, and hundreds per day at seemingly random intervals.  One might think that it’s tied to when I post new entries, but that seems to not be the case all of the time.  Yes, I get a bit of a spike each time I post something new – I guess I can thank rss feeds for that – but I get an even bigger spike whenever Autumn posts something new at servingmaster.com, which I still find amusing and heart-warming at the same time.  And yet, my best day ever seems to not correspond with either of those events, it was just a random Thursday where my site got several hundred hits for no reason that I can think of, but I’m certainly not upset about it.

One of my friends suggested that I should start putting up ads, but I have no desire whatsoever to do that.  I did not begin this as a money-making venture, and I have no need of the couple hundred dollars a month I could make from serving ads here.

Another friend suggested that I should write a book and promote it through the site.  That is something that might someday do – I’ve got several unpublished and unfinished books on my hard drive that could use some attention, but even that seems an unlikely goal when I barely manage to write new entries for the blog itself.

However, all of this aside, one thing I can say about the past year is that I’ve enjoyed the experience and that I have no plans of stopping any time soon.

This is a wordpress site (which should be obvious) and wordpress gives me a bunch of interesting statistics about the site, my visitors, etc.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that most of my page views in the past year have come from referer links on the servingmaster.com site.  However, in the past few months, the number of people coming to my site from Autumn’s has been eclipsed by those coming from google and I seem to also get quite a lot of folks from yahoo.

Even more interesting is the fact that wordpress collates the search terms that lead people to my site.

Back when I first started this site, I did a series of posts that I called ‘unasked questions’ because they were topics related to BDSM that I felt strongly about and that I know many if not most newbies struggle with, but I hadn’t really achieved the sort of penetration that led to people actually asking me questions in email the way that they do now.

It seems that most of the search terms that people use to find my site are about these pages, and oddly, some of them are questions that I have not yet answered, so this year I’m making a pledge to do so.

The top search terms that led people to my site:

1. limmerent submissive

This is kind of interesting.  This term has led people to my blog more than any other word or phrase for which people can search.  It makes some sense… I mean, I put ‘One Dom’s views on life, love, and limerence’ as the ‘mission statement’ for my blog when I created it, and my third (or fourth, if you happened to be one of the three people that saw my very first entry before I deleted it) blog entry is, itself, a story of my own limerent behavior as a submissive, but look at the word there as I spelled it and then look at the search term.

The search term is a misspelling!

I’ve gone back through my own pages, and I don’t misspell it anywhere that I can see, but somehow, when someone is searching for the misspelled version as above, I must be near the top of the pages that come up – and yet, when I did the search myself, that is not what I found, so this may have to remain a bit of a mystery.

2. sub drop

This, again, makes sense.  I mention subdrop many times in my entries, and there are quite a few other similar searches that also hit on the same idea: ‘subdrop definition,’ ‘can you have subdrop without a scene,’ ‘sub drop missing your dom,’ ‘when does subdrop happen,’ ‘how to tell your dom you have subdrop,’ ‘ways to avoid sub drop bdsm’ – just to quote a few…

I’ve experienced subdrop.  I’ve witnessed it many times.  I think I address many of these questions already, but just to reiterate:  yes, you can have subdrop without a scene; yes, you can feel subdrop just because you miss your Dom; yes, there are steps that you can take in aftercare and communications to try to stave off subdrop, but no, you probably can’t always completely avoid it altogether if it is something that happens to you; and no, not every sub feels subdrop and there is nothing wrong with you if you don’t.

3. dom rant

This one is kind of self evident, I think.  I’m kind of surprised that so many people are searching for me directly by name though.  It’s flattering, and also a little bit creepy.

4. doms training submissive

Now this is also kind of interesting.  I have never written an article about training a new submissive.  I’ve been asked to a number of times.  I’ve started such an article a number of times.  I have several unfinished, unpublished entries that tackle this very topic, but I’ve never actually published one.  There are several variants on this one too: ‘is part of a doms training a submissive to ignore them,’ can i punish my sub with her hard limits,’ and ‘training a submissive before a scene’ just to name a few.

I’m not an expert in how to train a submissive, but one of the reasons why I’ve had such difficulty in writing the article that would satisfy this question is that I think it really depends on the submissive – and in situations where I am giving someone else advice on the Dom as well.  I think that each of these interactions is dependent directly on the people involved and the relationship that you want to have with each other.

If I am able to maintain cold objectivity, this is a much easier process for me, but if I become emotionally entangled, and even more so recently than in the past, the whole notion of submissive training becomes one giant clusterfuck for me.

Who then, am I to advise others on this topic?

I still intend to tackle it at some point, but I need to get my own ducks in a row on this concept before I can have any confidence in advising others.

However, there is one question up there that I absolutely want to tackle right here, and right now.

“Can I punish my sub with her hard limits?”

Absolutely not.

That, my friend, is what we call abuse, and I hope that you get the ostracization you deserve for trying such a thing, if not a full court press on the legal issues you expose yourself to with that.

Hard limits are hard limits for a reason.  Respect them or you disrespect the person and yourself and the entire BDSM community.

5. subspace (or some variant thereof)

I added the ‘or some variant thereof’ bit myself in case that wasn’t apparent.  There are probably more distinct questions about subspace than anything else, but because each question is unique, the results don’t as easily correlate in the wordpress search terms page, I think.  Some examples:  ‘signs of subspace,’ ‘how do I get to subspace,’ ‘subspace bdsm’, ‘subspace mistress,’ ‘can I get to subspace without pain,’ ‘subspace sex,’ ‘how to get someone into subspace,’ ‘finding subspace,’ ‘subspace definition,’ ‘can your dom put you into subspace with a word,’ ‘ways out of subspace,’ ‘‘subspace commander’.

Obviously, that last one there is my favorite.

I talk a bit about subspace, and what it is, and how one might find oneself there, but it’s only really been the focus of one entry, so it’s a bit interesting that it seems to lead people to me so frequently.

Clearly though, it’s a topic of interest to people, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s something that I should probably be spending more time focusing on in my own personal relationship, so I promise to give this topic some more thought and attention in the coming weeks and months.

Is there something that you are interested in reading about that I didn’t discuss here?

Write to me in the comments, or send me an email.  I try very hard to make certain to answer every legitimate email that I get, though they can sometimes get lost in the spam filter, so if I don’t respond, please take that into consideration or use the Contact Me page – since most of those seem to get through.

Thank you for your attention over the past year, and I look forward to more to come.

I am still Rant, and I’m not going anywhere.