Great title, right? They tell me a good title gets people coming to my site…even though people might be disappointed in the content that follows. If you’ve come here for guidance, I’m afraid we all may wander around lost.
Be your own person, be a rebel, follow your own path; these are just some of the clichés that make you think of independence and freedom. You could probably assign some variation of every one of those phrases to a commercial you’ve recently heard. We’re bombarded with hackneyed phrases encouraging us “not to be sheep” but when we fail to have the success we want, we’re raked over the coals for doing “it” wrong.
There is something I want to do with my life, someone I want to be; but the path I’ve chosen to this point has been unsuccessful. About a year ago, I decided to start a blog. I would incorporate my particular talents into posts along with my drive to study nature and ocean sciences, and see where it takes me. I didn’t know I would also have to have an MBA in marketing and finance along with my MS and BS degrees in order to be successful.
Around the beginning of August, I resolved to finally begin making this blog idea a reality. Every day for a month I wrote something. Some days it was good, some days it was not so memorable, but I was creating content to post when the time came to set up a site. I’ve had a blog and a website for a week now, and I feel like I’ve been researching more on marketing and set up than creating content. This research has told me that not all my writing is in the same niche (I refuse to use the French soft “ch” pretentious pronunciation and I’m sticking with the hard “ch” that I have heard since middle school biology…it’s the A-mer-kin in me), and I need to incorporate optimized keywords into my posts in order to get more hits. It would seem hits, clicks and emails are more important to me than creating meaningful content.
The online resources tell me I need to have keywords and SEO and mailing lists. I have to market through social media and have an ad campaign. The successful bloggers have all made it this way and the results are proven. If you are in this boat too, you’ve looked all over the internet for advice. After about an hour, you have probably pushed aside the laptop or tossed the tablet over to the empty end of the sofa, and are reaching for an aspirin…and the remote because your brain is done.
The advice is all over the place. Have you noticed the articles usually have an embedded link to a paid app that is sure to optimize your particular problem? If you’re like me, you’re probably trying to do this with as little overhead as possible. It would be great to be able to pay for these upgrades that will optimize my blog. When I begin to see some revenue, I’ll look into them. Right now though the responsible part of my brain is telling me there is this thing called a mortgage that has to be paid each month, and unlike Jeff Bezos, my mom can’t loan me a quarter mil to begin my quest.
When I set up my website, the most agreed upon suggestion among the blogs was to set up a Google AdWords account. Google changed this system late last year, (a fact I wish was included in the two 2019 blogs I consulted) to Google Ads. This site is free, I think, until I begin to see some revenue. Apparently I am required to set up an ad campaign through Google for my site. I’m a blogger; I’m not selling anything. My “area of sales” is the world, and did I mention I’m not selling anything?!? This seems like a dead end until I can figure it out.
I next consulted blogs on how to promote my blog. This sounded promising. These blogs suggested guest blogging, promoting through social media, and commenting on other bloggers sites. A commenter on one blog mentioned the guest blog thing is considered “black hat SEO” now because someone wrote a blog suggesting guest bloggers were using someone else’s fame for their own advancement. It would seem the guest blog route is much more difficult now. OK…next.
It can’t be expressed in strong enough terms how much I despise social media and refuse to use it! I follow sports teams on twitter so I can find out which one of my teams has a player suspended for violating the league’s substance abuse policy or has a defender out for 3 weeks with a tweaked hammy. Facebook and What’s APP have been responsible for some thoroughly appalling societal calamities world wide, and Instagram promotes false identities and social overreactions. I have to beg an “influencer” to hawk my site? Actually, there is a blog (probably more than one) that gives me a list of “Science Influencers”.
Have you noticed a recurring theme here? Blogs beget blogs in a never ending perpetual motion machine of blogs spawning other blogs. If I could…I can’t even anymore!
The other member of my broadcast team, the one who holds the burden of keeping this ship financially afloat and talking me down from the metaphorical ledge when my dreams fall to crap, keeps encouraging me to post more content. The reason I’m doing this after all is to effect a change. This seems uncharacteristically idealistic, but randomness is part of his charm.
I know this isn’t supposed to be an easy buck. I’m willing to work to make success a reality. The work, though seems geared to make my content adhere to another companies’ business standards, not my own. As it says in “about us” section of this site, the team here (a team of two) doesn’t fit a mold. The internet claims to be a space where people like us can find our place, but the commonly accepted methods for finding that place seem to have certain conformity to them; conformity never breeds self expression.
I’ll take my chances for now being the tiny plankton floating passively in the vast ocean; but I’m a resilient little copepod
the take home
To paraphrase Paul Anka’s words;
For what is a (wo)man, what has (s)he got
If not( her)self, then (s)he has naught
To say the things (s)he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way
