A Confession

Ok, so this is where I come to speak frankly. I think a big part of that is because this is now my only blog where I'm speaking in first person. It's my personal preference really. It feels more personal to me. Unfortunately, it's not really considered appropriate or optimal as far as a writing style, and I'm optimizing everything I can optimize. Especially my writing. This blog gets to be the exception because it's somewhat of a relic. At least in my mind.

It seems to me like a dark little corner of the Internet where I can talk frankly about blogging and my writing projects, and be casual and probably largely go unnoticed, as I haven't linked this blog from anywhere and it's title is definitely not SEO friendly.

It's sort of a funny exception blog... I guess that's what it's really become to me.

Now, as for that confession I promised... I find I'm not enjoying writing as much! I guess it makes sense, though. Now that writing has become my job across a couple of different areas, it's starting to feel more like work. And it definitely is work... Researching search terms, researching SEO strategies, writing with SEO in mind (notice I didn't say "writing for search engines", because I'm not going to admit that it's synonymous), writing all those labels and categories and meta data fields! It's sort of maddening... In fact, the most important thing in my mind is content... And I know I'd be getting a lot more content done if I didn't have to take the SEO issue into account.

And aside from that... Really, SEO sort of pisses me off. I said it. The reason it sort of pisses me off is that it creates all these extra considerations on things. How many of us rewrite entire sentences or otherwise drastically alter our content not with a reader in mind, but to conform to these search engine standards that will either promote or bury our entire post? It's not the ideal...

While I'm making confessions I should note that my production has declined drastically. My attention has been very dispersed lately. I registered a new domain over the weekend and that's been the focal point of my online activities. It's about movies from comics, which is also the name of the blog. It has very high potential, so I'm happy to work on it, but I can't help but recognize I have too many blogs on the go now and seem to be spending my time creating new platforms instead of creating the content that they depend upon to operate.

Pure content creation really needs to be my priority. That always needs to be the priority because without content the entire framework is irrelevant. So I'm going to kick my own ass and make some firm commitments to produce the content that these blogs need. My traffic has declined to a point of near non-existence across the board with only a few exceptions. Drastic actions must be taken.

I've Been Updating Blogs Again

Wow... Ok, not to get predictable but I've spent another very busy afternoon and evening on the blogs. To be honest, I spent a lot of time on a little project I've started. Unfortunately it's one of those hush-hush kind of projects, so I can't go into a lot of details. Let's just say I spent a lot of time with RSS feeds today trying to do some leveraging.

Now if anyone out there is getting the hint, that probably makes you at least as guilty as I am! In all seriousness, though, I'm just experimenting with a bit of automation. Automation, although it's gotten a bad rep because of certain people exploiting it, is a vital part of saving time and energy.

I have a blog called Video Motivation which I painstakingly select videos for from YouTube. It might not look like much, with the very brief commentary, but that's a time-consuming process. There's a lot of "inspirational videos" out there on YouTube, but most of them aren't worth posting, and to filter through them all is a chore. Now I've been experimenting with having an RSS feed help me with the posting, so that instead of blindly searching through YouTube myself I can focus on filtering through unpublished posts that are automatically composed and waiting for my ok. Yes, I'm talking about autoblogging.

Autoblogging doesn't have to be unethical. If you're using it to automate tasks you'd be doing anyway and still focusing on adding value with original content and giving fair attribution to anything you syndicate, I am not going to cry foul. In my case, I do have somewhat of an ulterior motive here, as I'm hoping to also generate some videos I can import into my VodPod, which is a seriously undervalued platform... In fact if people knew what it is capable of when used creatively, it probably would end up being seen as a new "magic bullet" for generating traffic.

So, I can't say it's been the most productive evening as far as bottom line, but I have managed to get my blogs all sorted out and reformatted, and did create a few new ones based on some great keywords I discovered... Plus I've really breathed life into some expired blogs. I'm sure I'm going to be seeing a big increase in my traffic over the next couple of weeks.

Now it's time to finish off the rest of the blogs.

Hours of work

Hey, everyone.
So I've just finished up what was hours of work on my blogs. I still have hours more to go, but things are coming together. If you're curious about what I've been up to, I've learned a lot about SEO and I've been revamping blogs and creating new ones to experiment with some new techniques. Hopefully it works out well. I'll keep you posted!