Blogging Thoughts (and other things)

Keeping up with all the blogs and things I’ve added to Google Reader is a daunting task. I don’t really know how people handle all the areas of their life. I go in spurts, working on the website to the exclusion of all else, reading crime boards, I think I don’t multi-task very well. I just get stuck in whatever I am in at the moment. So when I went to Google Reader last night and finally made it to the bottom where I have Problogger listed I found quite a few gems. I’m so glad I have it listed or I’d have missed it completely.

My blog is increasingly unfocused from my original intent. I don’t actually mind that, I’m happy enough rambling about my daily successes or failures or angst or whatever. If I ever get focused and serious though, Darren Rowse has some absolutely superlative advice in several recent posts.

On August 8th he posted “24 Things to do When Stuck for a Topic to Blog About“. He has offered up some very creative ideas that I’d not have thought of. I don’t want to list them here because he says it so much better than I could, so go read this article!

Then on August 11th he came out with another beauty in “How to Find your Passion (& What You Should be Blogging About)” I don’t know if I’m the only one who has trouble knowing what their passion is. What I find most absorbing these days is web design, html, css, Flash, all that coding, I love it. However I am a babe in the woods compared to the people who blog about those subjects. I’m more read and learn than having anything informative to say. So maybe eventually I could write useful posts about such things, but not yet.His article however, gives insightful advice, another must read.

August 12th he wrote another great article, “How to Craft a Blog Post - 10 Crucial Points to Pause” and boy oh boy can I related to the first section in that!! I’m sure most of us can. Of course I don’t have the readership to begin with so not like I’ve lost anything. But I’ve still felt the disappointment when I’ve written something I thought was witty and it was something important to me and got nary a reaction anywhere.

He published another gem on August 14th. I’m telling ya, this guy is on a roll! “How to Choose a Topic for Your Next Blog Post“. I can’t say I used his techniques for this post, it’s just that after reading all of those excellent articles, this was what I wanted to write about.

If you are serious about blogging, whether to make money, gain recognition, or simply personal satisfaction, the one blog I have found that is well worth following is Darren Rowse’s Problogger. There may be others as informative, I haven’t found them and his writing style is very down to earth. I always feel like he’s writing to just me, he has a friendliness to his posts.

Now on to some reflections about my blog(s). My first blog is on blogspot and I really don’t do much with it at all now. But I added affiliate ads from paydotcom, also Google adsense. A few months back I had a sale on this ad:

Police Exam 911

Here’s a proven strategy to
passing your police exam.
Guaranteed to work!
policeexam911.com

Heh, I got $23.00 for that sale. Well, I sold another one and just got paid for it. Quite a surprise on a blog I’m practically ignoring. So you can see the potential is there. No one was interested in the Ron Paul stamp or the way cool Chinese tattoos though. I chose to write ads for things that interested me and who knows how well I might have done if I was actually working on that blog.

The other thing I wanted to mention is where the traffic on this blog is coming from. Almost exclusively from Google searches. I guess the subject matters tell me what I should be blogging about if I want traffic. I have many searches on DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy), Borderline Personality Disorder, Pineal gland brain tumor and depression. That is where the majority of my readers are coming from. It’s unfortunate that none of them comment. I only wrote one post on my brain tumor. It had good information in it but there’s only so much you can say. I’m finding it quite hard to follow through and wallow in long discussions of depression, BPD and DBT. I don’t know that I have useful information to give anyway. All I can tell you about is the pain. If you have BPD I suggest you find a DBT group as it’s very helpful to me.