Today I write about the art of blogging for lack of anything better to write or do.
But what to write about the art of blogging?
What, if anything, is novel about blogging? Such a hackneyed subject by now. Such an explored and exploited land. Nothing like the ocean bottom, nothing like space, nothing like the tile floor behind my toilet.
I could try and make a useful list on how to make your blog uber-popular, how to draw copious traffic to your URL.
I could give you invaluable tips on how to get blocks of keywords into your title; how to magnify your tag cloud in the right areas; how to get some wicked SEO mojo working for you 24 hours a day, all year long.
But you’ve already read all about it. You’ve already done it all.
You’re following the instructions. You’re posting and promoting and commenting on the blogs that already have a following in hopes of siphoning some of their traffic.
You’re polluting the Internet with slightly related links back to your URL. You have the rotating blog roll. You study Google Analytics to see where people are clicking, where they’re not. You refresh your unique visitor count every minute.
You’ve even sunk so low as to register on social media sites, the most pointless being Twitter, where you tweet, retweet, and follow like a chirping bird, not realizing that birds have very small brains.
The goal: to drive people to your site, to keep people there longer, to get them to look at more than one page and leave a comment, maybe even subscribe to your Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed.
The good news is that once you cover the basics of blogging, all it takes is marathon endurance. If you can harness the enthusiasm you had for blogging the first month you started learning about the art of blogging, and carry the same level of enthusiasm for 24 months, you will reach your goal.
Or you could just do this:
and drive around the country like a beatnik. It’ll expedite the process, I promise. Yes, this shameless* promo is still on my car today.
Ya get it? It’s the Google homepage with “the open end” in the search box. Try it out, we’re top result!
*See Writer X’s comment