Blogs

Blogging is not for the faint hearted. I wouldn’t actually say it’s as exhausting as climbing a ladder to paint a house, or shoveling a mountain of gravel in to a wheelbarrow in order to fill a drain field the size of Ohio, both of which I’ve participated in, but it’s not the gravy job some might think either.

First you have to chose what you want to blog about. Do you want to stick to one subject? Do you want to blog about just a couple? A few? What about a diary about your life. (Mine would take up a couple of paragraphs and bore a reader to tears!)

Then there are the technical things like pings and tags and RSS feeds, links, linkbacks and one-way link exchanges. Truthfully? I’m not a technical kind of gal. When I first read the phrase, “Ping my blog,” I thought I had stumbled in to some kind of kinky internet porn!

What I know about computers and the internet is on a ‘need to know basis’ only. If I need to know it, I’ll learn it. If I don’t need to know it, I could care less.

When people were raving about how much better Windows XP was than Windows 98, I went with the flow and trusted that the experts knew what they were talking about. The same as upgrades from Win 3.1 and Win 95, although a couple of those upgrades came by way of new computers.

The only differences that I can find between XP and 98 is that XP has Spider Solitaire and a pinball game. Oh! And the system restore feature, which I find to be a very cool and useful tool. However, on 98 I could win 75% of my regular solitaire games. I’m lucky if I win 10% on XP.

Seriously, though, I don’t see much difference when it comes to what I need. And that is? Just a few things.

Internet access for relaxing at websites like www.pogo.com and www.popcap.com-except if you try Rocket Mania at Popcap, it’s anything but relaxing. In fact it’s downright stressful!

I also use it to do things like check out urban legends for people at www.snopes.com, look up the correct spelling of/meaning of words when someone calls needing a quick answer. For finding out what actor was in this movie or who sang 'that' song they can kind of recall the gist of, even one complete sentence of the lyrics just escapes them.

And I do need it for...research.

Yes, I need the research capabilities for this blog, but I also research a great deal for my books. In fact, I’m gathering all kinds of information on ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia) and bone marrow transplants, because a fifteen month old character in the book I’m currently writing is afflicted with that particular disease. Granted I’ll only use a fraction of what I've learned, but I need to know enough so that I sound like I know what I’m talking about.

I can guarantee you that I know more about ALL than I do about successful blogging!

But I’m learning. Learning that I need to make a serious commitment to educating myself about it, if nothing else.

Promoting blogs seems like an overwhelming, not to mention time consuming, challenge. The ideas flying around the internet are legion and the successful blogger wannabe has to ask herself, do I apply little effort to many suggestions or massive effort to few?

And whatever effort I decide to expend is only in addition to
continuing to study the volumes of information I’ve collected so far, as well as continuing to come up with interesting (I hope!) blogs every day.

Although I’m thinking about rethinking the blog a day way and, instead, taking the advice of an extremely successful blogger-only posting every other day. But making them longer blogs, anywhere from 1,000-5,000 words. Actually I’ve been doing an average of 1,000, on most posts anyway, so that won’t be much of a stretch.

And since my ’readership’ is minimal at this point in time, it probably wouldn‘t matter much anyway. Maybe. I don’t know.

Well, yes I do. I need to make some decisions about how I’ll promote my stuff, then promote it diligently and...be patient. It’s just not realistic to expect five hundred readers my first week.

Nope. I’ll need to drop that goal to 499 instead.

Obviously patience is a virtue that I can’t lay claim to...

But I’ll work on that, too.

So, to my very few, but hopefully faithful readers, any suggestions from you about promotion? How are your blogs doing? Is there anything that would make you throw in the towel and do something a little easier?

Like maybe heading off to college so you fulfill your life’s dream of becoming a physicist?

(by the way...feel free to leave a comment, okay? :o)