Quality Over Quantity

Posted: June 9, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Blogging, Employment, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

You may have noticed that I didn’t post yesterday. You may not have noticed. It’s fine.

You may have noticed that my posts have not been up to snuff lately. I have, and I’m not happy with it.

I posted every day for over two years, but that time is over now. It’s been harder for me to make time to sit down and write a post with my new job and working twice as much as I’m used to working.

I tried using voice-to-text to write some posts on my phone, but my accent’s a little too thick for that, so I spent just as much time editing as I did writing/speaking the post in the first place, which kind of defeats the purpose.

I’m home early from work tonight, due to a lack of business and some schedule-swapping with my arch-nemesis, so I’m letting you know what’s going on around here.

I think a schedule would still be nice to have, even though I’ll post additional stuff whenever and wherever the urge strikes me. So sometimes I may still post every day for weeks at a time, and sometimes it will only be three times a week.

I’m still debating which three days: Monday-Wednesday-Friday? Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday? I’m leaning towards Monday-Wednesday-Friday. And I’d like for those posts to be a minimum of a thousand words.

But we’ll see.

I’m thinking of starting another blog too, which seems counterproductive, but I have things to say that don’t feel like they belong here, so there’s that. I’ll let you know.

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Publicity Works

Posted: February 9, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: Blogging | Tags: , , , , | 11 Comments

Today’s Daily Prompt:

Go to your Stats page and check your top 3-5 posts. Why do you think they’ve been successful? Find the connection between them, and write about it.

Easy peasy, y’all. 

My top four posts are:

  1. Birth Stories
  2. The Adoption Blogger Interview Project
  3. Submitting to My Submission
  4. ungovernable

I don’t think I understand this prompt; I’m sure everyone who has a captive audience the near the same small size as mine will come to the same realization.

My top posts’ views are well beyond my average numbers. The first is an entire order of magnitude greater, while the others range from 2-3 times my average number. 

And the thing they all have in common is publicity. 

  1. Birth Stories was featured on a Friday Blog Roundup at Stirrup Queens. 
  2. The Adoption Blogger Interview Project was featured at Production, Not Reproduction. 
  3. Submitting to My Submission was posted the day my Listserve email went out, and was my second Roundup shoutout. 
  4. And of course, ungovernable was shared around on Facebook by the guy who wrote the book. 

What is this prompt, a reminder that I am my own worst publicist? I already knew that. Seriously, I did. Swear. My friends have advertised my novel more than I have. 

It’s just–that part doesn’t interest me. It dips into my other time, my writing time, my reading time, my commenting time. And I already dip into that time enough for real life. 

Of course I’m tickled pink to get a notification that my stats are booming. Who isn’t? But that’s a brief rosy tickle; it doesn’t compare to the feeling when I write something right. The rightness of this missive I created doesn’t go away.

But a more interesting project would be to find the connection between my next top posts; the ones that fall at the tip of the norm, not outside it. Let’s have a look. 

My last four annual above-average performers:

  1. 2012: Inspiration.
  2. 2013: Whew!
  3. 2015: You. Guys.
  4. 2016: Pickles.

So, what do these have in common? 

Well, they’re all fairly light reading. Let’s dig a little deeper. 

  1. Inspiration was some nice inspiring reading just now; but it sure made me miss my blogging class of ’12. I’m glad that I still have contact with most of the bloggers I mentioned. The sheer volume of links here is what I’d lay the blame on for this post’s slightly-higher-than-normal popularity. 
  2. Whew! was a sleeper. I had to read the comments to find out why it got so many views: because I disappeared for nearly a month after posting it, it was where people went to check on me. Bless you for that, my friends. 
  3. You. Guys. was when I announced that I’d won the Listserve. I’m sure a lot of those views were from email-referred readers a few days later who clicked on my Listserve tag. 
  4. Pickles is self-explanatory, though. I mean, who can resist a trio of pickly haikus? 

No; I don’t believe that there is a tie that binds them all together. It’s just the luck of the draw, for me. 

I’ll have to take a looksie at what others have to say about their top posts. 

    Looking Back

    Posted: December 29, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Blogging, Entertainment, Self Improvement, Writing | Tags: , , , , | 6 Comments

    I just read my 2015 Year in Blogging, so I decided to have a look back to see what I’ve written on this day in years past, Facebook-On-This-Day style. 

    I haven’t published anything on December 29.

    But I did find The Fish.
    Oh my, that fish. I’ll have to ask my mother if she remembers cooking a whole fish and scarring me for life. I’m willing to bet that she doesn’t. 

    My most-commented-on post this year was also about food; sandwiches, in fact. Yesterday Ian and I had sandwiches for lunch with a fellow blogger, her husband, and their triplets. We even discussed several of the points I made in that post. Because sandwiches are serious business. 

    Jesse’s book brought me the most views in one day, but my Listserve win brought the most views on one post.  There’s some food for thought; one single real-life friend brought me more traffic with a Facebook share as did my own email to 22,000 strangers. Pretty neat, though. 

    It’s been a solid year in blogging for me. Especially since I decided to post every day. Seven months in and still going! 

    If I could just find the time and inclination to finish up my NaNo project…

    Titling is Half the Battle

    Posted: October 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Blogging | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments

    I must pay homage again to jjiraffe, who guided me to this post by Lori at Write Mind Open Heart. It’s the results of a survey about blogging, and it got me thinking about how I work.

    I’ll throw a quick excerpt from Lori’s post in here: ‘Among the 5% [who title first, then write the post]: It’s the blank at the top. Therefore, I fill it in first. ‘

    Wow, I’m totally like a sociopath in that I title first. You know, ‘we are very rare, and we are mostly men.’ Maybe not. Sorry, I just watched Girl, Interrupted again the other day.

    Anyway, point is, I title first. I’m extremely uncomfortable writing a post that doesn’t have some semblance of a title. Somehow it feels like I’m devaluing what I’m writing. If it’s good enough to write, it’s good enough for a title!

    And titles are so important. Titles are like cover art for books or albums. It’s my chance to draw you into this seamy underworld I write in before you quite realize what you’ve gotten yourself into here. They can be cutesy, or spoofy, or clever, or shocking, or alliterative, or boringly indicative of what’s to come.

    My preference for my titles is not the latter.

    I like titles that pop. Unfortunately, those can be hard to find at times, or with certain subject matter. But I try not to give up and say ‘well, that’s the best I got.’

    My husband is a namer. Pets, household items, body parts, they all get names. I am not. Except when it comes to writing. Maybe I understand that urge better than I thought I did.