Milestones

galby68, , ,

I’m two weeks away from my third anniversary on WordPress.

Do you think they’ll get me anything?

I’m not registered anywhere.

I find myself torn emotionally about my blog, recently.  I can’t tell if it’s an actual ambivalence about my blog or if it’s a low-grade professional depression creeping in and coloring my perspective.

Here’s what I’ve accomplished:

I’m closing in on 300 entries.  That’s a lot to me.  I think my original goal was to publish a couple posts a week, so I’m a little light against that goal.  But I’m within about a dozen entries.

I’ve got about 150 documented followers.  That’s a lot, considering I only started this blog because a few people in Facebook badgered me into it.  Can I take a dare, or can I?

And I’ve got about 10,000 views.  Well, more, actually…for whatever reason – probably, unknowingly the way I have it set up – when someone clicks into my homepage, I lose visibility to what they look at.  Who knows where they go or what or if they read anything.

Still, while I count those as pretty solid metrics for something that started as a dare, I measure myself against other bloggers and fall short in the comparison.  

That kind of bugs me.

I don’t blog every day.  My posts are pretty long, usually over 1500 words.  If you’ve read my blog, you wouldn’t be surprised to know that I’m not surprised that my fellow Americans can’t commit to something over 100 words.

I’m killing it in the UK and Australia, though!

I don’t get as many likes as the bloggers I measure against.  When I see someone with more likes on a post than I have followers…I get a little

Then again, those bloggers have a specific content…and post daily.  And I just don’t.

Effort I put into SEO for my blog? It’s not zero, exactly…I mean, I know what SEO means!

But at the same time, I use my blog semi-therapeutically. Bitching about the state of social graces in America, psyching myself up to endure another round of this Persistent Survival thing I’ve got going on, my dating – or not dating – exploits.

And, yeah…work, sometimes.  Less so, and much less specifically nowadays since several people at work read this.  I mean, I’d hate to get into trouble at work for my behavior on what could be considered a social media platform.

Which would be ironic, since what has me depressed about work is the futility of it.  The absence of institutional accountability:

Those who have a personal work ethic, do good work.  Demonstrating a will, at least, where they may lack a particular skill.

For those who don’t have a functioning mechanism within them that holds them accountable to consistently meeting the expectations of their roles…well, they don’t meet them.

And nothing happens when they don’t.

It’s depressing.

But, for all of my omnidirectional themes, I’m reminded of how sometimes just checking in with my metrics can be therapeutic in and of itself.  A couple times a week, I’ll notice that there’s hits from a search engine.  Search engines are one of the leading – as far as I can tell – contributors to homepage hits.

I used to think it was Sacha.  Once or twice a year, he’ll fire off a rant at me to stop writing lies about him, that our mutual friends read this and then tell him about it.

I’d say that’s one of two things actually happening:

A) those are my friends and they don’t really like him that much and are fucking with him,

Or,

B) he’s checking in on his brand and doesn’t want to admit it.

Either way, I didn’t really care.

But then this started happening more and more often

My search engine hits have been lining up directly with my posts about BDSM and fetishes or kinks.

Ok, A) who wants to know what my thoughts are on that topic?!?

And, B) how many pages of results did you have to scroll through to get to mine?

Lol.  There’s some unexpected sexual healing…

Now, why don’t you go out there and help a brother out by sharing a post from my blog that you’ve enjoyed?  I’ll take more followers, happily!

Milestones

13 thoughts on “Milestones”

  1. Congratulations on your approaching anniversary. Don’t worry about followers, hits, etc. You produce, you get results, and (hopefully) you enjoy writing here. That’s all that really matters. Just think: if you had five million followers and you posted a grammatical error, just how embarrassing would that be? Keep on writing! Naked hugs!

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  2. No one wants to know what you think. Some horn dog from Romania is searching for porn. I have several titles that get the most hits. “How Old Guys Get Lucky” “Forty Pounds, Naked” and “Cross Eyed Cupid”. No boobs or butts or…A potty mouth girl I used to think was funny until she started selling stuff (why they mine for followers) wrote a post – “There are no boobs here” about all the perv hits she got because of some of her post titles. Strange people looking for “cross sighted skinny girls” among other things. You want search engine hits, put a lot of sex-ish slang in the title and the tags. I write because it gives me a twice aweek deadline to hit, except for the last two weeks when I just said “Puck it – Enough.” Because I’s certain I’m the only one holding my breath or gives a puck.

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    1. You’re cracking me up with your Dave the Filipino impression. 😂
      Great titles you listed…making them racier than the content is fun. Plus, I have several friends that read and occasionally star in my posts that would turn an innocent phrase into something not so innocent, anyway, so I may as well have a little fun, too. Thinking of my buddy, Diezel, here. Talk about horndogs…

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      1. I don’t know Dave but he sounds like one irascible motherpucker. Down Texas way ch takes a beating. I wonder why I bother to edit most of the time, language and manners as pucked up as they are. I’m working in a considered response to your manners post, having done a couple of overcrowded venues this week. Wait for it. Redneck designer heaven, magnolia market, Waco. The line was around the block! My wife said Puck this… so we turned around and drove home. The last big things in Waco were the Baylor football rapists scandal and David Kuresh.

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    1. Haha. I know! *Someone* had to get after me to do that damn test…but seriously, what are the search term that I pop up in their results?
      Phil’s probably right. I should just give all my blog posts crazy, sexualized double entendres for titles.

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      1. Do you use googles search console? That’s how I can see the search terms I appear in and which ones result in clicks. 🤷🏼‍♂️
        If sexualised double entendres work for you we’ll all be doing it haha.

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  4. benleander says:

    I know what you’re talking about here. I also compare myself to other bloggers, as we all do on social media anyways all the time. Sometimes I’d like it to be more and sometimes I don’t care. I also don’t have the energy to give a crapy about SEO or promotions when I know I should but actually I just wanna write.

    I like your blog although I’ve just discovered it. As long as there’s people reading that’s great. And even if there seems to be no one it’s still good for you (as you’ve written ‘semi-therapeutic’).

    One piece of feedback I have for you: I’m not really into your layout as I’m not a fan of having to scroll a lot to get an overview of what someone’s blogging about. Maybe something to consider.

    Cheers! Blog on!

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    1. OMG…that’s great feedback on format! I’ve been kicking the notion around, but have been ambivalent about recommitting to another look. But this might be the right kick in the butt for me!

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      1. benleander says:

        Hey there! What a nice n cute response 🙂
        You can just be lazy and steal someone’s format that you like. There’s also a great Widget in the Customization area that orders your latest posts (either as an Archive or as a Top 10 – see how it looks as a Top Ten list on my page if you’re interested.)

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