Have a Blog or Have a Life

You really can’t have both you know.

I’ve been diddling around here for a bit, just looking at Google Trends and this and that, I almost wrote a blog post about a service that is hiring people to be personal assistants-in the stand in line and buy me tickets sort of way. It only cost twenty dollars a months so I can imagine what they pay the people who pick up the dry cleaning. But that didn’t seem all that interesting.

Then I thought about writing a blog post about the 2009 Harley Davidsons, only there don’t seem to be any 2009 Harley Davidsons to write about just yet. Not that that has ever stopped me, but really, I am not a motorcycle type of guy. So I skipped that as well.

I used to read one of those annoying Get Rich Blogging fellows who said that you need to have at least ten blogs if you want to be serious about making money online and that he himself has over fifty blogs. Like many of the money bloggers he lists his income from time to time and if he is making what he says he is making, then it is working for him. I have yet to give up my ‘real’ job and pursue blogging full time-nor do I see it happening anytime soon.

But I did try to start a few other blogs, I had nine going at one time, and have four or five others in limbo at the moment, with one other blog getting a semi-serious bit of my attention-London Thoughts. I have these occasional posts on a handful of other blogs and gave up completely on three or four.

It takes me a while to whip out a blog post-an hour in not uncommon-though it might not show in the finished product, I do put a bit of the occasional effort into my writing. So what happens is this-I started blogging for the fun of it, as I have always been a big letter writer and pretty much wrote blog posts before there blogs to post them to. I would add photos, colored type, song lyrics, and the odds and ends of whatever I was doing at the time. These proto-blog posts mainly baffled the people I sent them to.

Then I found the blogsphere. Once you start a blog, as you may well know, you want to get it ranked and listed and shared and commented on and all the other odds and ends that let bloggers keep score. Pound the keywords for Google and mention nudity for Digg, try to write a funny title once in a while for FARK. Join a million odd social networks and try to promote your blog there-I still get hits from Hubpages and Squidoo lens I wrote over a year ago and pretty much forgot about. Submit to directories and blog aggregators like Blogcatalog. Hit the RSS Feeds and Pnig-O-Matics of the universe. Make it easy for people to bookmark-though I seldom write anything that needs to be looked at more than once.

And this process of blog promotion never ends, there is always a new site popping up that might bring in new readers-Hello Plurkers!-and there are new directories to be listed in. I am thinking of doing a podcast and using my many odd ways of speaking to confuse and baffle my audience a bit more. But I am having trouble getting my microphone to work at the moment. There are always technical issues as well, of one sort or another. There are always stats to look at, almost ten thousand visitors so far this month, is that good or bad? I used to get a thousand a day on a regular basis, but now it has dropped down to five hundred or so a day.

But I do love blogging for all of that. I like dropping Entrecards and seeing new blogs and I have even begun to leave comments and get comments. But that brings me to that whole Real Life issue-I spend a lot of time hitting sites and leaving comments and looking for post ideas and making new friends. The Wife and the job and that stack of books I’m reading and those TV shows I like to watch and those new movies I want to see-well, I don’t get so much done, but I do manage to stay busy.

Gotta go now and do something.

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