if you make me happy…
HHHH – okay, just a song by Garbage that is running through my head. I’ve survived over a week of the tick tock world and am beginning to think I’ll live and still be happy.
As if New Mexico wanted to remind me why I was putting myself though all this, and why I love it here so much, I started my last work day with a brief visit from a Red-Winged Blackbird, happily singing his head off from the top of a power pole. One of my favorite birds, and although they are pretty common in town, a rare visitor out here in the desert. They much prefer to be near water.
A few days earlier the yellow headed blackbird came by and even tucked himself into my chicken coop to steal their breakfast and say good morning. It’s pretty neat to have one of my “wish I could someday see one of those” birds dropping by every spring for a few days.
On the way to work, we passed a roadrunner – they are so neat. Further on down the highway a small band of eight mule deer in their sleek summer coats paused to give me a good look before leaping off into the desert. We usually see them near the lake, not out here. We did have a good storm, so I guess everyone came out to see how much the waterholes filled up and test the graze.
The wildflowers are starting to bloom, but there isn’t much in the way of green grass yet. We seem to be having our windy season about a month late, so I suppose the rain will be a month late, too.
When it is windy I don’t have Internet. Between that and only two days off I haven’t been around much. I have some requests for coloring pages I haven’t even started on and over 100 emails. If I owe you one, sorry, I’ll get to them when I can.
I have read some great blog posts lately though, mostly (it seems) on Happy Lotus, like this post on the High Beam to Success. I really like the part of the quote about advertising being fine as long as it is used to inform, but not to manipulate. This is a principle I’ve always stuck by – sort of part of my personal honor system. That’s probably why I’m not a particularily successful Internet marketer. There are just some things I will not do.
It got me thinking, too. I have been doing a lot of thinking about my personal direction, and the direction of what’s left of my little Internet empire. What purpose does it serve now that I am no longer actively trying to make a living at it. My thinking has evolved and changed even in the last few weeks.
I’ve been noticing, especially now that I’m more of a reader and surfer than perpetually working on my own “stuff” that the big push to “make money from your blog” with all the well meaning and informative articles on how to do it, how this one does it, how that one does it, that it seems to me that blogs have become…homogenized. Some bloggers have created their writing style to revolve around advice on what gets people to read, like lists – the top ten blah blah blah. And How to yadda yadda yadda. One minute it is “develop your brand” and the next it’s guest posts.
My point being that in the beginning blogs were very individual, very true to their blogger and their interests. Bloggers wrote for themselves and their friends and by golly, other people enjoyed it, too. There weren’t a lot of rules about “how to make money from your blog” so bloggers just wrote what they wanted to, when they wanted to. Blogs were fun to read and gave you a real feeling of knowing the person on the other end. Sure, there were business blogs that only talked about the lastest thing that XYZ business was selling – but they were obviously so, and if you happen to buy XYZ’s products you might be pretty excited to learn they had a better widget coming out.
But now, I skim down the reader and see post after post with similar titles, and much of the posts I do read are regurgitated content from other blogs or print books or articles with little or no personal thoughts or opinions or experiences to give them any flavor.
The social sites, Twitter and Tagfoot being the only two I really follow much anymore, but from a quick glance, the others as well – are not so much people sharing this or that article or video they found interesting, as self promotion platforms to get more folks to come look at your blog, Squidoo lens, or latest full page ad disguised (not very well usually) as an article.
After a bit over ten years as a full time Internet junkie, I think we are seeing the whole blogging and social sites thing come full circle. They’ve had their heyday, and now that they are little more than advertising gimmicks, I think we’ll see them decline. The ones that will survive are the bloggers who have never catered to “write blogs for money” get rich quick schemes, those who kept their voice and their interests and their personality. I also think that a lot of the people who are blogging in hopes of making a living from it, are going to discover, as I did, that Google is fickle – and no one else counts. After a year or two of $200 one month and $20 the next, they’ll quit purely due to financial concerns and go back to the tick tock world. Whenever their hopes run out. Others will continue to blog, because they simply love to blog, to write – and their regular readers will be very glad. We’ll have fewer blogs, but they’ll be better reading.
With the “current economic situation” (which I think is largely the product of the negative media hype BTW) I’m sure we will continue to see a lot of people wildly casting about to “make money on the Internet” with everything from Squidoo and Hub pages to blogs and social sites. I don’t expect that bubble to last long though – as a good many of them will soon discover that you aren’t going to get rich and quit your day job on the strength of one webpage written with all the latest gimmicks and next to no real content or originality.
Some of the lenses I’ve seen lately barely even make sense. Even a free ebook I downloaded recently desperately needs an editor for grammer, punctuation, spelling and simply making sense. Just typing straight from a book into your Adobe software doesn’t make you a WRITER. (Actually, it makes you something else, but we won’t go into that)
As always – I want to live to be 100 just because I think it will be interesting. *evil grin*
I was talking about some of my own thinking, and got sidetracked into a rant – LOL. The blogs I have left are largely created to showcase my writing, although they have a lot of other ads on them – especially the sex blogs. But the more I think about it – the more I think I’m going to make the rounds as I have time and pull the vast majority of those ads off. End each sex story post with a link to buy The River Way and call it good. Before long, I hope to have the new book done as well and when it finds a publisher I’ll add links to purchase it. Just informing my dear readers – not manipulating them (and wow do porn sites use every manipulation trick ever invented).
(*as an aside*)With all the free porn available now, even considering that I think porn sales will go up through this economic downturn (vice always does well in troubled times – we do need our little escapes) I don’t think pornslinging is nearly as viable a way of making money on the Internet as it once was – unless you’re the big guys handing out tons of free stuff to make a few bucks from others advertising on your site.**
As always – I’m a little ahead of the curve *wink*chuckle* so my blogs will all go back to being just me. Like ‘em or don’t. In all actuality, I don’t care anymore if they make me any money. It would be nice if they displayed my writing well enough that I can attract a good literary agent that can get my books published by a real publishing house, because I think they deserve that. If I actually sell a copy or two of The River Way too, well, that would be nice. I probably won’t get paid for it, but I’d like to know a couple of people read it anyway.
You know you can download it free here, right?
LOL.
And a mea culpa…looking at the Squidoo lens written to promote The River Way – and all my other promotion of this novel, I think I’ve made a mistake. You see, I’ve always talked about the “nice” parts of the book, the nature observations, the sort of mainstream friendly bits. I have this silly hope that people will get drawn in by that, and then gobsmacked by the more controversial bits. That the people that IMHO “need” to read it, will. How wimpy of me. When I get time, expect to see the guts of the book hanging out on the advertising. If you can’t take talk about incest, bisexuality, and prostitution you probably ought to be reading something else anyway.
Have a great weekend. I’m off to my tick tock job.
Blessedbe
Summer Fey Foovay
