It’s 3pm Thursday 5 August 2021, and I just doubled my stats from 2020, my previous best year. With five months yet to bank, it may be the right moment to reflect on how to make the best of the remains of the year.
Because what’s ‘best’ for me, is not what’s best for most.
Most blogs aren’t like mine.
It’s true, I sometimes find a web-logging site on a zombie platform like livejournal or blogger that’s just as cryptic, but mostly they’re just rolling commercials. Because I don’t blog for profit, concepts like ‘bounce rate’ might as well be a warning label sewn into a bra.
Because my blog is extra-bouncy. Just my natural hyppytyynytyydytys? Maybe, because I reckon most blogs have become so serious. There are thousands of extroverted types gagging to share their secret (but SO powerful) SEO tips, which are like totally guaranteed to “boost your reach”.
For a tiny fee, of course.
Big smile, white teeth, et cetera.
Blogging has become a side-hustle, not just an indiscretion you’ll live to regret. I follow one (for the contrast) who fills her empty life with plagiarised recipes and selfies. You know the type — hey y’all, here’s us living our best Idahoan lives! — but, I’m like, whatevs. I’d like to ask her — does everything always have to be about you? Seriously?
Don’t people understand crassness anymore?
Of course, some bloggers have thousands of subscribers. I weep for them, honestly. Because, like a company you built from scratch, the last thing you want are stakeholders — even if it does make you stinking rich.
Because then your blog isn’t your blog anymore, it’s theirs. Crowd surfing may be fun, but where are those mofos taking you??
It took a troll to show me how comments can be hijacked, but I learned for myself how approval tends to redefine you, and there are endless examples of how a cashable formula (recipe + sexy selfie + affiliate link = the win) is the sweetest nose-candy of all.
But for me?
COVID hasn’t thrust a spanner into the works, it’s tipped an entire toolshed into the cogs. All the activities I blog about are off-limits, so with an intellect vast, cool and unsympathetic, all I can do is regard the daily news with envious eyes, and slowly and surely draw my inspiration from it.
Or curl up with the cat and a good book.
Writing about what’s newsworthy has become the key to growing my blog in 2021. If I was just writing poems, I would have disappeared. If I was just writing fiction, same. And while there’s a voracious appetite for sleaze, a little smut goes a long way.
At least try for a quality product.
Luckily, the truth nowadays outstrips my imagination, and fiction pales beside fact. So I’ll keep writing heroically about real things from my side of the sphere, even if only holds your attention for 30.63 seconds….
