It occurs to me that if you read, oh let’s say, ten of my posts in a row, you probably would wonder what the hell this blog is for. I wonder sometimes myself.
It all started with MySpace – yes, the beast of the marketplace that will one day vanquish Google and take the title of “Supreme Being On the Web”. As I was saying, it all started with MySpace. I joined because a friend of mine insisted. Pretty soon I was all into it: decorating my profile page, selecting the music, uploading the right photos, looking for friends, and writing my first real blog. I still have two blogs I started on Blogger.com before then that rarely see any action.
But MySpace was different. I could see when people were visiting my profile, I knew how many times my blog was viewed. I had a list of people who had subscribed to my blog and I could see pictures of their faces. It was personal, man. I loved it. I shared very personal thoughts, ideas, emotions, and memories with those people. They responded to many of the things I wrote. I had total strangers who weren’t even subscribers send me emails to thank me for sharing how much I love my wife. I touched people’s lives.
Of course, I couldn’t always write on the heavy, emotional side. A guy needs a break. The unfortunate side of blogs is the relatively short attention span of most people. If you stop writing for more than two days, you just lost a chunk of readers. My goal was to build a readership and then try to transport them to this website.
It didn’t work. For one, I started writing here more often than there because I was using this for business and I wanted to show how I can write. Not only that – i was impatient too. My MySpace readers needed another month or two at least to become habitual readers of my blog. Then they would have taken the time to click to another website just to read my stuff. Well, live and learn.
Right now, my blog pages are being viewed approximately 200 times per day. It’s not that I’m trying to feel important. What I’m trying to do is build a reputation. This is me slowly establishing rapport with a community of readers. Yes I’m building a reputation through each contract writing project, but the reputation is with a small group of businesspeople. I want to reach the masses. I want to connect with the everyday man and woman. I don’t want to be anyone’s savior. I don’t want to be a celebrity – just one of your favorite writers.
The haphazard topics and photos come from whatever stage of growth I’m now in. I have a lot of opinions. I don’t necessarily need to share them all. I guess this is both my way of building a readership and honing my craft at the same time. Perhaps a handful of people someday will be able to say that they enjoyed the priceless journey of watching me evolve and mature into an excellent writer – a poet. That is my hope. For now, I’m just more than a little bizarre.