For Me, I'll Stick To The Fun Stuff...

I remember going to a writing symposium a few years ago and I attended a panel on increasing your online presence. It was created to help authors and artist to improve their visibility online, and therefore, help improve sales if and/or when they published something or unveiled a work of art.

One thing stuck out at me. They said if you want more blog followers, you needed to be specific--the more specific the better, at least, that's what statistics showed. I can definitely understand the logic. If you want to get your fix on a certain subject, if you know a blog has what you're looking for, you'll read it. You want to hear about video games, there are blogs out there. Theater = the same. Food, crafts, photography, movies, writing, editing, relationships--it's all there just waiting for those interested in those topics to come and enjoy.

I walked away from that panel a bit conflicted. There were a couple of things I wanted my blog to do. I wanted to write daily, and I wanted to make sure I did something creative on a daily basis. Being specific on this blog didn't really fit into my goals. Sure, I could write a daily blog on writing. That would mean I'd have to come up with writing stuff to blog about everyday. I mean, as you can perhaps tell, I am not spending hours and hours on these things.

I had to conclude that I wasn't going to get thousands and thousands of followers. For me, I'd be fine with a several dozen a day. And that's the way it's been for many years. I noticed this last week a post about about political things hardly registered a blip when it came to page views. However, the post just the day before got several hundred. Granted, I posted the earlier on on Facebook and highlighted several friends in that post. I'm sure that helped, but I've had posts get hundreds of hits without doing that. I don't do a lot of political posts--I don't like going there. Politics (especially lately...) seem to cause people to shut down their brains and stop people from actually talking to each other.

No, I think I'm going to stick with the fun stories. They are, by definition, fun.